April 9, 2023, 10:20 PM
April 9, 2023, 10:20 PM
It is two in the afternoon on a spring Sunday, the sun illuminates the beach of Tregantle, in the southwest of England, like in a Turner painting. But under the sand of this paradisiacal place hides a silent invader.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? But look under your feet,” says Rob Arnold, 65, an environmental activist, engineer and committed artist. He bends down and pulls out of the sand tiny plastic ballsnicknamed by some “mermaid tears”.
Mostly transparent, about the size of a lentil, these microbeads are used to make plastic objects. But, like oil, they leak easily during transport and handling, and are persistent pollutants that absorb other pollutants as well.
About 11.5 trillion microbeads they end up in the ocean every year, according to the British organization Fauna & Flora. Once in the wild, they travel with ocean currents and often wash up on beaches and other shorelines.
“Because of their size and shape, birds and other marine creatures mistake them for fish eggs and eat them. If one animal that has ingested them is in turn eaten by another, the entire food chain is affected,” explains Arnold. .
That day, one dozen people participate in cleaning the beach, including Rob and the special machine he has invented, made up of a large plastic bucket, a large rack, and a tube system.
“Separate plastic waste from natural ones and from the sand thanks to a filtering system”, explains to AFP this engineer who now uses microbeads and other microplastics to create works of art.
Jed Louis, 58, wears a khaki sweatshirt with the name of the local beach cleanup association on it.
“This beach is especially polluted due to its location, currents and its shape so open to the sea,” he explains. “It is in autumn and winter, due to the weather, when we find more microplastics on the beaches: storms, tempests and winds bring them to the surface. Unfortunately, the plastic stays, it doesn’t disappear.”
For Clare Wallerstein, 53, “sometimes it’s a bit like doing archaeology. If we dig in the sand, we’ll find different layers of plastic.”
A portion of these microbeads is given to Arnold for his artistic creations. Another part is used to raise awareness in schools.
But the rest, which cannot be recycled, ends up in the trash and is incinerated. “So the plastic and its chemicals end up in the air,” laments Clare.
After three hours, the volunteers will have cleared just a few square meters of Tregantle’s beach, which has hundreds.
Arnold looks at his loot: a large tarp full of microplastics. Once dried and classified, he will be able to add them to the 20 million microbeads that he has collected in six years and that he stores in a friend’s garage.
Arnold turns these plastics into works of art. With almost a million pieces collected on the beach, he has created a sculpture of more than 1.7 meters, similar to the moai statues of Easter Island, in Chilean Polynesia.
It is on display at the Cornwall National Maritime Museum in Falmouth under the title “A History Lesson”.
“It is a metaphor for what we are doing to planet Earth. We are contaminating it, exhausting all its resources. If we destroy it, we will have nowhere to go,” he says.
For his next creation, he would like to make a meteor headed towards Earth “as a nod to the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, because (…) that’s exactly what we’re doing. Like the meteor, we’re destroying our planet.”
After cleaning up the beach, as he puts away his bags, he looks disappointed.
“Sometimes I think about throwing away all my bags of microplastics to the river from a bridge. It would be so shocking that maybe, finally, people would notice,” he says.
