Saturday, April 24, 2010

Welcome to the Plastic Beach

I've recently been listening to Gorillaz's latest album, Plastic Beach. You can get a flavour of it from the YouTube site here.

The title sounds like a contradiction, after all who would want to go to a beach made of plastic? Well it appears that we might not have a choice, given the amount of plastic floating around in the oceans today.

The BBC is currently broadcasting a series called Tropic of Cancer, in which Simon Reeve travels along the line of that name. In the last episode, to be broadcast tomorrow, he ends up in Hawaii, where they found a beach with more rubbish than sand.

The biggest trouble was the plastic breaking down into smaller and smaller grains, until it merges into the sand, impossible to remove (see below).

You can get a taster from this extract on the BBC site.

Sorry to keep blogging downer environmental posts, but this bugs me: it just isn't right.

2 comments:

O Docker said...

I, for one, would encourage more environmental posts, JP.

Your post on End Of The Line a while back led me to track down a dvd of the film and I was glad I did. I was going to do my own post on it, but in reviewing yours, saw that you had already made the most important points, probably better than I could.

These are the kind of stories that get pushed off the front pages by news of war, violence, and Britney, but in the longer perspective I think they're far more important.

Keep up the good work.

JP said...

Thanks for that O'Docker, and glad you managed to see End of the Line, a scary film.

I suppose I'm wishing the posts could be more constructive than simply "isn't this awful", but then the first stage to doing something is finding out about what's wrong.