Hawaii is generally considered to be the one place in the world where you should be able to guarantee finding paradise. The beautiful tropical islands have been used as the setting for countless TV series, ranging from Lost to Jurassic Park.
Isolated in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, distance alone should protect Hawaii's spectacular landscapes and turquoise sea from the environmental problems facing the rest of the planet.
So when I arrived in Hawaii, at the end of a long journey around the Tropic of Cancer for my recent BBC2 series, I was staggered to discover beaches covered in plastic rubbish washed up from around the world.
Threat: Plastic is destroying the environment -
here a young lion is pictured with a plastic bottle trapped in its mouth
Simon Reeve said the environmental dangers posed by plastic are
being ignored by politicians
Pristine sand was covered by old plastic toothbrushes, combs, shoes, belts and mouldings. Sam Gon, a Hawaiian conservationist, took me to one beach where 70 local volunteers had just removed tons of garbage.
Yet as soon as it was cleaned, the waves dumped another mountain of rubbish.
The larger pieces of waste can be collected by hand. But when Sam and I dropped to our knees, I could see the surface of the beach was covered with millions of small plastic pellets, known as nurdles, the raw material that factories warm, shape and mould to form the almost infinite number of plastic products that surround our lives.
Dumped, lost or washed out of factories into our seas in their trillions, the nurdles would be difficult to remove from the beach even with a giant sieve.
Yet the big shock came when Sam told me to dig into the sand. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. Instead it breaks down into ever smaller pieces.
Among the grains of sand, and to a depth of several feet, were billions of tiny plastic flecks, which the pounding of the sea was reducing in size.
As I dug through the plastic, I realised the sandy beach was being transformed into a plastic beach. A chill went down my spine.
During the past five years I have travelled around Earth's tropical region for three television series, Equator, Tropic Of Capricorn and, most recently, Tropic Of Cancer.
On my trips I've explored and investigated some of the most pressing issues affecting us and our planet, including poverty, disease and religious fundamentalism.
My journeys have left me in no doubt that the most critical challenge we face is our relationship with the environment.
Rubbish: Plastic poses a real threat to the wildlife of the planet
Wherever you stand on the issue of climate change, no one should be in denial about the damage we are doing to our world with deforestation, over-population and by poisoning our rivers and oceans with rubbish.
From the beaches of Hawaii to the seas around Britain, we are soiling our own nest. Since finishing my travels and returning home from Hawaii, I've taken a closer look at British beaches.
It was a shock to realise how they have changed since I was a child playing on beautiful coastlines in Dorset and south Wales, where my little brother James would happily eat the sand.
Britain's beaches, just like those in Hawaii, are now covered in more litter than ever before.
The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), the charity dedicated to protecting our seas, shores and wildlife, has revealed that while total litter has increased by 77 per cent since its Beachwatch survey and clean-up in 1994, plastic litter has increased by an extraordinary 121 per cent.
In September, the MCS will be organising another national Beachwatch clean-up and it needs all the help it can get.
Decades ago, beach rubbish was biodegradable. Now it is mainly plastic and even beaches that seem clean can have an astonishing 5,000 plastic fibres per litre of sand. But worryingly, the plastic we see on our beaches is just a fraction of the plastic waste that is clogging our oceans.
Apart from a tiny quantity that has been incinerated, all the plastic ever created - totalling hundreds of millions of tons - is still out there in the environment in some form.
Huge amounts have been stuffed into landfills as rubbish, from where plastic can leach poisonous toxins into groundwater supplies.
Damage: A wild black bear whose head got stuck inside a 2-gallon clear plastic jug,
presumably while foraging for food in Minnesota
But vast quantities have also been dropped as litter on beaches or city streets around the world. Rivers often wash it out to sea.
Added to that are the estimated 600,000 plastic containers dumped overboard by ships and navies every single day. In total, at least 100 million tons of plastic rubbish is thought to be sloshing around in our seas.
The scale of the problem is extraordinary. The beaches I visited in Hawaii are being swamped by rubbish from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast accumulation of the world's plastic debris floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Twice the size of France, the Garbage Patch is like a plastic soup in the sea and is doubling in size each decade.
Unbelievably, it is not alone. Scientists are convinced that sea currents have created five vast swirling garbage patches in our oceans, including a huge one in the North Atlantic identified in the past few months, which has up to 520,000 bits of rubbish per square mile.
Even more rubbish lurks below the surface, as around 70 per cent sinks down to pollute the seabed.
This is an international scandal and a global problem, for which we are all responsible.
From bicycle helmets to food packaging, from water bottles to toothbrushes, plastic makes our lives easier.
But its production and use is completely out of control. Factories produced more plastic in the first decade of this century than in the entire 20th century.
Dumped: Plastic biodegrades into smaller plastic pieces never completely disappearing
They are churning out a staggering 300 million tons of plastic each year, much of which will be turned into products that are used once and then thrown away.
As rubbish on land, plastic is a scourge of our modern world. In our seas, the damage all this plastic does is terrifying.
Plastic garbage traps, chokes and kills at least a million seabirds every year and 100,000 marine mammals.
As if that wasn't bad enough, it could also be killing us.
Plastic fragments release potentially harmful styrene compounds, contaminating the sea, and they attract other nasty chemicals in the water, such as DDT and PCBs, which then 'stick' to the plastic.
Fragments of plastic collected from the sea around Japan have been found with concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals at levels one million times higher than in the surrounding seawater.
In some areas of the Pacific there are six times more plastic bits than plankton.
Because the polluted fragments are so small and look like food, they are being gobbled up by small fish, which in turn are eaten by larger fish - which in turn are eaten by us.
So plastic is ruining our beaches, choking the oceans and poisoning our food chain. The consequences are still not fully understood, but they are likely to be devastating.
Human wastage: In Bangladesh, they have abandoned plastic bags and
replaced them with natural jute bags
This environmental catastrophe is being completely ignored by our politicians.
Yet there is so much that could and must be done to help the problem.
Alternatives to plastic and biodegradable plastics made from corn and soy are under development.
We need to spurn and reject the main culprits: plastic bags, packaging and single-use water bottles, a wasteful obscenity. These make up the bulk of plastic garbage.
In Bangladesh, they have abandoned plastic bags and replaced them with natural jute bags. If they can do it, so can we.
At stake is the future of British beaches, our seas and the food chain. It is nothing short of an environmental emergency.
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