'It looks like snow': how Australia plans to fix the 'horrifying' blight of expanded polystyrene
Graham Readfearn
On a two-kilometre stretch of the Yarra River east of Melbourne’s CBD a few years ago, volunteers were gathering rubbish from the banks and reeds.
Among all the discarded bottles and bits of plastic sucked up with an oversized vacuum were an estimated 5 million pieces of expanded polystyrene – some in the form of tiny white balls, others in chunks at various stages of disintegration.
“It is not how a river should look,” says Andrew Kelly, the fulltime Yarra riverkeeper on the ubiquity of this feather-light expanded plastic, known as EPS.