Queensland's coast is covered in plastic rubbish, according to research from the CSIRO, and the bad news is we only have ourselves to blame.
On average, beaches from the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast had 11.6 items of plastic rubbish per square metre, according to a recent survey.
However CSIRO principal research scientist Chris Wilcox said the amount of rubbish is greatest on the coastline of city fringes.
"You can pretty much look at the amount of debris and work out how far you are from a city," he said.
The national survey of Australia's coastline also found the vast majority of the plastic waste was local.
"Really most of the stuff coming from our cities ends up in local environments," Dr Wilcox said.
"About 13-14 thousand tons have entered the ocean from Australia's coastline on an annual basis and it equates to about five to six pieces per person in Australia."
Dr Wilcox's team of about six spent six months collecting data for their national survey. They found up to 40 per cent of the plastic rubbish found were drink containers, but the professor said fishing equipment was another common culprit.
"If you tangle up your fishing line on a rocky bit at the bottom and rather than wading out and picking it up you just cut it off, it doesn't seem like that big of an impact," he said.
"But if you think about every one of us doing that a couple of times a year and that stuff lasting 600 years, it sort of suggests it's quite a big amount that we're adding to the environment."
The plastic waste also affects marine life, with more than 600 marine species found to have ingested plastic.
"For something like seabirds which seem to have particularly high ingestion rates, it's more than half of all the sea birds globally. For marine turtles it's about a third," Dr Wilcox said.
"Essentially the pattern has been as people have looked more they find [plastic waste] in basically everything that they've looked at - everything from small plankton all the way up to whales."
While the volume of plastic waste is bad news for the environment and marine life, Dr Wilcox said the fact that it's mostly local means we can all do something about it.
"One of the big conclusions from the study is most of the stuff on the Australian coastline and in the Australian marine environment is coming from Australia," he said.
"We are both the cause of the problem and the solution.
"So to me that's a really encouraging thing, in that it says local solutions will improve the local environment and local people will benefit."
