A dead whale has washed ashore with a lump of rubbish in its stomach containing more than 1,000 plastic pieces.
Rescuers found the rotting carcass of the 31-foot sperm whale in the Sulawesi province of Indonesia.
The piles of trash in its stomach, weighing 13 pounds, included 115 plastic drinking cups, two flip-flops, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 further plastic pieces.
As the carcass was buried on Tuesday, environmental campaigners condemned “throwaway culture” which led to its suffering.
Louise Edge, senior oceans campaigner of London charity Greenpeace UK, said: “If nature had a distress signal to warn us that it can't take any more of our plastic rubbish, it would look like this: a dead whale with 1,000 pieces of plastic in its stomach.
“Our throwaway culture has turned whales' guts into dustbins for our plastic waste. And the global plastic contamination doesn't end there. This material is already in the food we eat, the water we drink, and inevitably in our bodies too. It's clear that we can't go on like this.
She added: “If we want to stop this slow-motion environmental disaster unfolding before our eyes, we need to immediately start cutting the amount of throwaway plastic we produce.”
The UK's Less Plastic campaign said: "We produce TOO MUCH plastic - that’s why it ends up in a sperm whale's stomach, or inside a fish destined for your plate."
Indonesia is the world's second-largest plastic polluter after China, according to a study by the “Science” journal. It produces 3.2 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, of which 1.29 million ends up in the ocean.
Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, a maritime affairs minister in the country, said the whale's discovery should raise public awareness about the need to reduce plastic use.
He said: "I'm so sad to hear this. It is possible that many other marine animals are also contaminated with plastic waste and this is very dangerous for our lives."
Additional reporting by Associated Press.
