I really woke up to the problem when I arrived at a beach in the Philippines (I wrote about this on our sister site ) where we found heaps and heaps of plastic brought in from the ocean by the waves. We decided to spend an hour every day collecting the plastic, did that for a week and ended up feeling like we didn’t make any difference really. I did some reading and realized; this phenomenon isn’t just about the Philippines… on our travels we have seen this in many other places, including S.E. Asia (Bali, Krabi). How Many Marine Animals Are Killed by Plastic Each Year? Well, that seems to be a hard question to answer accurately. There are estimates though, according to UNESCO : one million sea birds are killed by plastic each year; one hundred thousand marine mammal in general are killed every year; Industrialized humans have produced a LOT of plastic since the ’50s: more than eight million metric tons (half of which was manufactured in the last thirteen years) and much of which is di