loosened.
"It takes a while but eventually after a lot of pain, and I mean it’s a reptile so it can’t express pain like a mammal can in its face, but you can see that it’s just closing its eyes and its all sort of tensed up and all of a sudden ‘poof’, it all comes out," he told AFP.
But "sometimes they can’t. More often than not, the animal will... die." Plastic ocean pollution is a key item on the menu for ministers from over 100 countries gathering in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi for a three-day UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) starting on Monday.
The problem is a global one, affecting all the oceans and hundreds of animal and plant species. According to environmental group WWF, 8.8 million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year, the equivalent of a garbage truck dumping a full load every minute.
Plastic is cheap, versatile and nigh-indestructible. And by now it is pretty much everywhere. A shopping bag is estimated to degrade over hundreds of years, and harder plastics could be around for millennia before they are broken down and absorbed in the environment.
In July, US researchers said more than 9.1 billion tonnes of plastic had been produced to date, most of it dumped into landfills and the oceans. Ahead of the UNEA meeting to tackle the scourge of pollution, UN Environment Programme head Erik Solheim urged action to stop the oceans becoming a "plastic soup".
On current trends, he warned, "by 2050 there will be more plastic in the seas than fish". In Watamu, the locals do what they can. Mohamed Iddi, a 42-year-old fisherman, proudly proclaims that he voluntarily collects two or three large garbage bags full of plastic along the Blue Lagoon beach every day.
"Some plastic is brought from the sea. Some others is from... when people they come for the enjoyment on the beach, for the barbecue, the picnic," he says, pointing to large piles of collected rubbish, divided into categories, with a special heap for shoe soles.
"Sometimes I find plastic in the stomachs" of the fish he catches. "Ropes, the small ones. Because when the fish goes to look for some prey... when it finds something like this... it will think maybe it is something to eat." Elsewhere in town, a project called Regeneration Africa melts and treats the plastic gathered by volunteers such as Iddi, and moulds it into paving stones and other materials to sell for funds to continue the anti-plastic drive.
Fisherman-turned-environmentalist Kahindi Changawa, 40, looks with a smile over the tank for Kai, a green turtle which has been recovering from plastic ingestion at the Watamu rehabilitation centre for nearly a month. Green turtles were once a delicacy in Kenya, but may no longer be eaten under laws to protect the endangered species from extinction.
Kai was brought in emaciated, and unable to stay underwater. On top of the laxative, it was given anti-bacterial and anti-parasitic medicines, and appetite-boosting multivitamins. For six days now, no plastic has been spotted in the turtle’s stool, Changawa says with tangible relief.
"It has fully recovered, when you take it out of the recovery tank it is flapping, it is fighting," he said. "It’s a very successful story, we are hoping to release it if not today, in the next two days or so." Many others will not be so lucky.