For the past two years Harriet Paterson has been searching the beaches of Western Australia's south coast looking for nurdles.
Nurdles are the lentil-sized plastic pellets that get shipped around the world as a base ingredient for all plastic products.
Dr Paterson, a scientist at the University of Western Australia, has been researching microplastics and found the region's beaches may not be as pristine as they first appear.
On a recent beach clean up at Anvil Beach near Denmark, Sea Shepherd found more than 3,000 nurdles and over 4,000 other microplastics.
"Unfortunately, I don't think it's a unique event," Dr Paterson said.
"That amount of plastic occurs variously along all of our beaches along the south coast.
"It's an environmental disaster."
WA south coast in a 'plastic slipstream'
Dr Paterson said the amount of microplastic waste on WA's south coast could be relatively high due to ocean currents and its location.
"Unfortunately, because of global circulation and the water currents and where we're located on the planet, we're kind of in this plastic slipstream from the Gyre in the Indian Ocean," she said.
"So even if we're not producing it, it's coming our way."
In 2017 more than 2.25 billion nurdles were spilt into the ocean from a ship off the South African city of Durban, and they have been creeping their way to Australian shores ever since.
Dr Paterson said it was impossible to know how many Durban nurdles had washed up on the south coast as by now they had probably spread around the world to form part of the everyday assortment of nurdles found on beaches all over the globe.
"Plastic comes and goes from our coast, but you're far more likely to find a lot of plastic on our beaches in winter after a storm, particularly when there's an ongoing south-westerly wind," she said.
"During summer when the easterly winds pick up … we find much less marine-derived debris on our beaches."
Reducing 'frivolous, cryptic and dumb plastic'
Dr Paterson has surveyed multiple beaches along the south coast, with the most plastic being found at St Mary Inlet, 300 metres upstream in the Fitzgerald River.
Her research has led to the creation of an educational resource called 'Frivolous, Cryptic and Dumb Plastic'.
The program is available to the public to teach people how to recognise and remove unnecessary plastics from their everyday lives.
Christmas is a good time to think about the purchase of plastic products, Dr Paterson said.
"Buying quality products that are going to last a long time and be really meaningful to the recipient far outweigh buying loads of plastic junk," she said.
