That is so disturbing. I saw a lot of bottle caps in there...that's the one piece of plastic that I've never been able to recycle...nobody will take them. What's up with that!! We should be able to recycle just about anything at this point in time.
Depending on where you live, you might be able to recycle bottle caps (both metal and plastic). In Portland, we can't recycle them at the curb but we take a full garbage bag of plastic "film" (like bread bags and Adorama pillow packs) as well as lids and weird rigid plastics (cigarette lighters, plastic spoons, things that come in packaging) to a city recycling area about once every month or two. It might be worth checking for similar facilities in your area. If you can devote a spot in a garage, basement or closet to separate and collect these things, it at least can make you feel better ;-)
As long as oceans are being used as trash dumps this sort of thing will continue. The question is how do you get people to stop tossing trash into the oceans, lakes, rivers and other waterways?
One of the BIG problems is the cruise ships. I think they just dump their garbage in the ocean while they are out of any country's juridistriction. What can be done?
RE: "I'm presuming it took a while to accumulate that much junk in their stomachs. . . . "
It is mostly chicks that die this way, and they do so before fledging, so it actually happens pretty quickly, in just a few months. The adults make foraging trips of up to 7,000 miles and four weeks long, then return to feed their chicks. Sometimes the adults mistake plastic for prey (i.e., for squid or jelly fish), other times the plastic is actually encrusted with prey, in the form of flying fish eggs. Plastic consumed by the parents gets regurgitated to their chick along with real food, and the chicks apparently are less able to expel the plastic than the adults are. I takes only about two ounces to kill a chick. The interiors of the remote islands where the albatrosses nest are littered with plastic, all of which arrived inside albatrosses. A great book on the Northern Pacific albatrosses is Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina.
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Sandy r
Guy
It is mostly chicks that die this way, and they do so before fledging, so it actually happens pretty quickly, in just a few months. The adults make foraging trips of up to 7,000 miles and four weeks long, then return to feed their chicks. Sometimes the adults mistake plastic for prey (i.e., for squid or jelly fish), other times the plastic is actually encrusted with prey, in the form of flying fish eggs. Plastic consumed by the parents gets regurgitated to their chick along with real food, and the chicks apparently are less able to expel the plastic than the adults are. I takes only about two ounces to kill a chick. The interiors of the remote islands where the albatrosses nest are littered with plastic, all of which arrived inside albatrosses. A great book on the Northern Pacific albatrosses is Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina.