The whale’s grisly death renewed focus on the problem of plastics ending up in oceans. The Philippines is the third-biggest contributor of such waste.
A beached whale found in the Philippines on Saturday died with 88 pounds of plastic trash inside its body, an unusually large amount even by the grim standards of what is a common threat to marine wildlife.
The 1,100-pound whale, measuring 15 feet long, was found in the town of Mabini with more than 40 pounds of plastic bags inside its stomach, along with a variety of other disposable plastic products. Darrell Blatchley, owner of the D’Bone Collector Museum in Davao City, was attended a necropsy on the whale and called it the worst collection of plastic inside an animal he had ever seen.
“The plastic in some areas was so compact it was almost becoming calcified, almost like a solid brick,” said Mr. Blatchley, who has seen other marine mammal post-mortems. “It had been there for so long it had started to compact.
