I also do surveys for some types of marine litter - particularly balloons - beached balloons. In the late 1980s, I did a series of studies of marine litter coming ashore. All the garbage that you see washed up on the beach - the plastic bottles, plastic bags, the glass materials, the metal materials... everything comes from the ocean, is delivered by the ocean because
there is no picnicking on Sable Island. There are no beach-goers and all the garbage that's produced by the station is recycled or incinerated and shipped back to the mainland. So it's an ideal location to get an idea of what kind of litter is in the marine environment because we know that everything that's there is from the ocean. Balloons that are washing
around in the ocean - balloons with ribbons or balloons without ribbons - are a hazard to marine animals, to marine organisms. Sea birds, fish, sea turtles... any of the marine animals might accidentally swallow them, either just as a result of curiosity or feeding. In some cases, animals can get entangled in them; particularly sea birds can get
entangled in them. And that's pretty much the same as what you find with plastic bags and bits of plastic that get into the environment. These things present an entanglement and ingestion hazard for marine animals. It's incredibly wasteful. Basically people have balloons and they look very beautiful when they're going into the sky or when you have them all
tied up into bundles of hundreds and hundreds of them. But they eventually just turn into another kind of litter.