‘Your plastic is here’: how Easter Island copes with 500 pieces of rubbish an hour washing ashore

Kina Paoa Kannegiesser sorts plastic from seashells at Ovahe beach on Easter Island. She melts down the plastic she collects and turns it into miniature versions of Rapa Nui’s famous moai statues to sell to tourists, who thereby take a bit of plastic back off the island. Photograph: Akira Franklin/The Guardian

From a distance, the colourful beach at Ovahe seems a postcard-perfect mosaic of natural beauty. Craggy volcanic boulders, pockmarked from bubbling lava, jut from the sand, garnished by a necklace of pastel-coloured corals and seashells pounded to pieces by the wild, crashing surf.

As the waves pull back, however, another reality emerges. The sand holds few corals or shells. Instead, the high-tide mark is a multinational carpet of plastics polished into an array of bleached Coca-Cola reds and Pepsi blues.