Article: "Canary Islands beach choked by tiny bits of plastic"

From far away, it almost looks as though the beach is covered in seafoam. But the white bands washing ashore in Tenerife, in Spain's Canary Islands, are in fact piles of tiny bits of plastic, the latest example of the human-made pollution impacting the world's oceans.

"I’ve never seen the beach like this,” said María Celma Argaluza, a 37-year-old teacher and founder of the Océano Limpio Tenerife (Clean Oceans Tenerife) campaign, in a video of the waste she posted on Facebook on March 24. “It makes me want to cry.”

Argaluza criticised the insufficient measures put in place to address the build-up of rubbish along the shores of the Canary Islands.

Because the islands act as a natural barrier to the Gulf Stream and the Canary Current, they become a dumping ground for rubbish floating in the Atlantic Ocean, May Gómez, a biology professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, told the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais.

 - France 24