How Litter Causes Harm to Marine Life
- Mary Zhuang, Stacey Paiva
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Plastic pollution is choking our oceans, threatening over 700 species towards extinction and killing more than 100,000 marine mammals due to ingestion and entanglement each year.
Ocean Pollution: A Growing Threat to Marine Life
On a beach, a child bends down to pick up what she thinks is a seashell. Instead, it’s a cigarette butt stuck in drying seaweed. Nearby, a gull pecks at a small piece of a plastic bottle cap as a wave rolls in carrying a plastic bag. These everyday scenes are visible signs of the ocean pollution problem.
Underwater, the impact is even more devastating. A sea turtle mistakes a plastic straw for food, while a seal becomes entangled in discarded fishing line. Litter left behind during a single beach visit can begin a long, traumatic journey through the ocean food web, threatening marine life at every level.
The Clean Shores program was launched to fight ocean pollution through innovative technology, sustainable beach cleanup solutions, and community education. Our current initiative centers on raising funds for our first BeBot—an eco-friendly beach-cleaning robot—that will begin operating in Massachusetts, with plans to expand across New England, New York, and New Jersey as we grow.
How Big Is the Ocean Pollution Problem?
Every year, an estimated 12 million tons of plastic enter the ocean. Over the next 20 years, that number is expected to triple. Today, plastic accounts for approximately 85% of all marine debris. Much of it comes from single-use items like straws, shopping bags, cigarette butts (which contain plastic filters), and plastic bottles and caps.
Unlike organic materials such as food or paper, plastic doesn’t naturally break down and return to the environment. Instead, it fragments into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics that can persist for hundreds of years. These microplastics continue polluting oceans, harming wildlife, and entering the food chain—posing serious risks to both ecosystems and human health.
Plastics are made from fossil fuels like crude oil and natural gas, and they can leach harmful chemicals into the water as they break down. These toxins, along with chemicals from items like cigarette butts, can accumulate in the bodies of marine animals, affecting their growth, reproduction, and immune systems. Even animals that don’t directly eat plastic can be exposed to these pollutants through the food chain, making litter a chemical as well as a physical threat to marine life.
While plastics dominate in volume, other debris including glass, metal, rubber, and abandoned fishing gear also contribute significantly to marine pollution.
Today’s Beach Trash Is Tomorrow’s Ocean Problem
Trash left on beaches can easily be carried into the ocean by wind, waves, and rain. In fact, up to 80% of marine pollution starts on land, as everyday litter—from beaches, streets, and communities—making its way into the ocean through wind and waterways.
In the United States alone, volunteers collected the following items from beaches and waterways in 2024:
388,738 cigarette butts
218,988 plastic bottle caps
57,902 plastic bags
129,561 plastic beverage bottles
67,961 plastic straws
178,572 food wrappers
What was collected represents only part of the problem. Volunteers can’t be present on every beach at all times. Countless pieces of litter go uncollected and eventually flow into the ocean. Once trash leaves the beach, it doesn’t disappear—it simply becomes harder to see and far more difficult to clean up.
How Does Ocean Pollution Harm Marine Life?
The truth is that the litter we toss away isn’t just ugly on the beach—it’s literally killing ocean animals. A review by Kuhn and van Franeker of 747 studies found 914 marine species had been affected by entanglement and/or plastic ingestion, including seabirds, sea turtles, whales, seals, dolphins, and many kinds of fish.
Creatures big and small mistake plastic for food, leading to internal injuries, blockages, or starvation. Others become entangled in debris, causing injury, drowning, and death.
A recent Ocean Conservancy article highlights groundbreaking research showing just how little plastic it takes to be deadly to marine life. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2025, found that the lethal dose of plastic is far smaller than most people realize.
Ingesting less than a sugar cube’s worth of plastic gives Atlantic puffins a 50% chance of death. For loggerhead sea turtles, that threshold is less than half the volume of a baseball.
For porpoises, just one-sixth the size of a soccer ball is enough to be fatal for half of them.
These findings underscore the urgent need for stronger ocean conservation efforts. What we throw away doesn’t vanish—it becomes a lasting threat to marine life.
Most marine litter doesn’t come from a single source. It accumulates through everyday actions and larger systemic issues. Common beach litter—cigarette butts, food wrappers, drink bottles, straws, and takeout containers—is often left behind and blown into the water. Fishing and boating activities add to the problem through lost or discarded nets, lines, traps, and rope that can drift for years. In urban areas, trash tossed on streets is carried by rain into storm drains, then into rivers, and eventually the ocean.
At the same time, plastic production continues to rise while recycling rates remain low. A culture built around single-use products designed to be used for minutes—but last for centuries—allows marine pollution to grow faster than it can be removed.
Take Action Now
The same beach that once held litter can also be a place of life and hope. A child should find shells, not cigarette butts. Waves should wash over clean sand, not plastic fragments. Offshore, marine animals should swim freely—not tangled in our waste. Every piece of litter is a choice, and those choices shape the future of our oceans and communities. Clean beaches aren’t just about appearance—they are essential to healthy ecosystems, sustainable food sources, and strong coastal economies. We created this problem, which means we can solve it.
By supporting Clean Shores, you can make a real impact today. Your donation funds our first BeBot—an eco-friendly, beach-cleaning robot—removing litter and restoring beaches for people and wildlife. Together, we can protect marine life, preserve our coastlines, and create a future where clean beaches are the norm, not the exception.
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