Coles is being attacked after Stikeez collectables were found washed up on a WA beach.

Sea Shepherd Australia’s Marine Debris Campaign wrote in a Facebook post that a volunteer named Danny found two Stikeez collectables on Beach north of Perth on Saturday.

“Wildlife can’t tell whether an item is made of plastic or something to eat. If ingested a small, colourful plastic toy vegetable can be life threatening,” the post said.

“For Coles, this Stikeez promotion might have been aimed at healthy eating for children, but for an animal there’s nothing healthy about a stomach full of plastic.”

The Stikeez promotion ran from February 13 to Tuesday March 26 or until most stores ran out.

Not everyone thought Coles was to blame though.

“Coles is irresponsible in producing the bits of useless plastic, but we as consumers are irresponsible in accepting them and allowing our children to make us shop this way. If we refused them Coles wouldn’t have a market.”

“Blame the people that threw it there (or lost it…?)” he wrote. “I went to the beach on Saturday and saw a plastic wrapper from a health food product. No whinging, I picked it up and put it in the bin.”

“Can you please stop blaming inanimate objects for stupid people’s actions? Did coles have anything to do with it being on the beach? Did they put it there? No? Then how could they possibly answer. Did the plastic grow legs and walk there? No? So how is plastic the problem again? Why did we ban plastic instead of modifying it to break down within weeks, make fuel as a byproduct, save jobs lower industrial fuel manufacturing in the process, this all sounds more eco friendly right? Yes it does, but instead we let opinionated idiots runs the program. PLASTIC ISN’T THE PROBLEM, STUPID PEOPLE ARE!”

Others recommended saying no to collectables at the check-out.

“If no one took them, the supermarkets would not have these environmentally destructive promotions,” one woman wrote.

“You know, if people don’t buy this rubbish, they’ll stop selling it…It’s up to the consumer to send the message,” said another.

Some even commented that a child could just have easily left them behind when playing at the beach.

A Marine Debris spokesperson for Sea Shepherd told Yahoo News Australia they want Coles to stop campaigns involving single-use plastics.

“Given that Coles is making efforts to improve in areas such as its plastic bag policy, we were surprised to see them giving away these single-use plastic toys in their stores,” the spokesperson said.

“However we were not surprised that, months on, we are found them at one of our regular beach clean-ups.

“Coles Stikeez collectables are single-use plastic items that will be used once and go on to live forever once the ‘craze’ passes.”

There was a similar backlash after one of the Little Shop toys were found on a QLD beach.  Read that here.

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