Plastic rocks found on Brazil’s Trindade Island in pollution sign

The latest sign that plastic pollution is a gigantic global problem: rocks fused with melted plastic have been found on a remote Brazilian island, best known as a nesting site for green turtles.

Plastic rocks have been previously found in various parts of the world. Researchers documented plastiglomerates – rock, sand and other debris fused together by melted plastic – in Hawaii in 2014, for instance, and pyroplastics, rock-like pebbles formed out of burnt plastic, on the southwest coast of England in 2019.

Now researchers have discovered a new kind of igneous rock, plastistone, formed almost completely from plastic, on Trindade Island, a volcanic island more than 600 miles east of Espírito Santo in Brazil, said Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil.

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She and others gathered samples in 2019 while studying geology on the South Atlantic island, which also houses a marine reserve. Typically, only 30 to 40 people live on the island and their refuse is recycled or carefully disposed of.