Bermuda’s waters are polluted with high levels of plastic waste, according to an international team of conservationists.

The Plastic Tides team are spending nearly a fortnight on the Island, using paddleboards to sample the seas for micro-plastics — plastic that has broken down into tiny pieces — and making a film record of their work.

Gordon Middleton, the Plastic Tides videographer, said the team had seen evidence of significant quantities of larger pieces of plastic in the water.

“Every time we went out paddling, every 10 to 20 minutes, maybe more frequently, a piece of plastic would float past me. And on the beaches that are less-frequented — there is a lot of it,” he said.

But he added that was “a good sign because on the more popular beaches there is very little — people are picking it up and taking it away.”

Also in the four-strong team is expedition head Christian Shaw, an American environmentalist and watersports expert, conservationist and film-maker Julian Rodriguez from the Philippines and London-based botanist Celine Jennison. They have been taking samples from the ocean around Bermuda as part of an Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation project.

They are using paddleboards, camping out and using solar power in a bid to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.

Mr Middleton explained that, while large pieces of plastic were more noticeable, broken down plastic posed a serious problem because it acted as a sponge for dangerous chemicals like toxic PCBs, which are absorbed into the material and then ingested by fish before eventually entering the human food chain.

“Macro-plastic is only photodegradable, not biodegradable. When you make plastic, you’re making it for a thousand years.”

Mr Middleton added that plastic was broken down into tiny pieces by light over time, but that it never degrades completely.

“Plastic has been found in human bloodstreams in tiny particles because we’ve been eating these things for so long. We’ve been eating fish that eat plastic for long enough and its making its way into out bodies,” he said.

“The biggest thing right now is to be conscious about it and picking up plastic when people see it and not to use plastic if it can be avoided — use a reusable bag not a plastic one.

“At the end of the day, we’re poisoning the sea and poisoning our own bodies for convenience. It’s silly, actually.”

Mr Middleton said the team aimed to move to the Philippines to carry out the same tests in the waters around the island chain.

He said Bermuda was picked as the first stop on what is hoped to be an ongoing survey because Bermuda is in the Sargasso Sea — where the “North Atlantic trash gyro” can be found.

He added: “Bermuda is under threat because of that. Trash ends up collecting there in very high concentrations of macro and micro plastics.”

Mr Middleton said that other reasons included Bermuda’s natural beauty, which underlined the threat plastics posed to the environment.

“There is no better way to get people interested in a subject when you contrast beautiful beaches with trash.”

He said that, as the first leg of the expedition, the team wanted an environment they could safely test their equipment and procedures in.

“Bermuda is great because the people are super-nice and very helpful. If we got in a situation, we could get help and we don’t know what kind of situations we could get into.”