A recent study conducted by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Imperial College London found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, published on PNAS journal, analyzed the studies made since the early 1960s, and the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird's stomachs.

Birds mistake marine plastic debris for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death. Other adverse effects of plastic ingestion are caused by the pollutants leaching from the debris, which eventually accumulate in the birds' organism.

The analysis revealed that in 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010. The researchers predict that plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world's seabird species by 2050, based on current trends.

The model used in the study allowed also to identify the area where the risk for seabirds is higher, which turned out to be the Southern Ocean boundary in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, an area previously considered at low anthropogenic pressures and low concentrations of marine debris.

However, improving waste management methods can reduce the impacts of plastic on marine wildlife. As Dr Hardesty (one of the authors of the study) stated, "Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time."

For more information please see the press release

The complete study can be found here