In Italy, in the North of Sardinia, found the corpse of a pregnant female sperm whale, in the stomach which was 22 kilograms of plastic debris. The baby was about to be born.
A dead animal, eight meters (26 feet) long, washed up on the beach in the tourist area of Porto Cervo. President of the environmental organization SeaMe Luca Bittau told CNN that 22 kilograms of garbage, including plastic bags, fishing nets, fishing lines and other items were found in the stomach of the whale.
Sergio Costa, Minister of environment of Italy, wrote on his Facebook page that the problems of environmental pollution with plastic are important and require immediate solutions.
Costa referred to a recent European Parliament law prohibiting the use of disposable plastic products such as straw, cotton swabs and Cutlery by 2021.
"Garbage in reservoirs is a problem of the whole world, not only Italy, but each country is obliged to fight it. Italy will be one of the first countries to decide this. The war with disposable plastic began. And we will not stop there," he stressed.
According to UNESCO, plastic debris annually causes the death of more than 1 million seabirds and more than 100 thousand marine mammals.
This is not the first discovered dead whale with a lot of plastic debris inside. Recently, a whale with 40 kg of plastic in the stomach was found on the Philippine island of Mindanao; in the spring of last year on the shore in southern Spain found a dead sperm whale with 29 kg of plastic inside, and in the fall of the sperm whale, swallowed a huge amount of plastic, found on the coast of Indonesia. All this highlights the scale and consequences of plastic pollution of the ocean.