Henderson Island

Henderson Island forms part of the Pitcairn Islands group, a British overseas territory in the South Pacific, and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1988. It is uninhabited and access to it is extremely difficult: it lies more than two hundred kilometres from Pitcairn, itself already one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world.

It is a raised coral atoll, a platform of fossil coral lifted by tectonic movements to some thirty metres above the sea and ringed by limestone cliffs, with an inland plateau covered in dense vegetation. That kind of formation is uncommon, and Henderson stands out for preserving its ecology practically unaltered: it is home to ten endemic plants and four endemic land birds, among them the flightless Henderson crake, the Henderson fruit dove and a warbler found only there.

Despite that isolation, the island became world-famous in 2017 for the opposite reason: a scientific study found that its beaches held the highest density of plastic waste recorded anywhere on the planet, with tens of millions of fragments carried by the South Pacific gyre from thousands of kilometres away. The case became the symbol of the fact that no place on Earth lies beyond the reach of plastic pollution.