Washed Ashore

Sea stars, fish, sea turtles, jellyfish and coral are among the marine organisms most affected by plastic pollution in the oceans. A recent, striking art exhibit calls attention to the problem. Called “Washed Ashore,” this touring exhibit includes giant sculptures of sea creatures assembled from plastic rubbish collected on Oregon's beaches. Lead artist Angela Haseltine Pozzi and scores of volunteers gathered the trash and built the sculptures, which are both spookily beautiful and appalling.

Plastic is a severe problem for ocean dwellers, who often mistake the colorful bits for food. Floating plastic bags look to turtles like jellyfish, their main food source; fishing gear gets tangled in reef organisms and chokes them. Plastic does not biodegrade, ever, but it does photodegrade – that is, break down into smaller and smaller pieces that remain, chemically, plastic. These tiny, colorful pieces get swallowed up along with or instead of plankton by fish and sea birds.

Sometimes the plastic is enough to kill an animal on its own – as many as a million sea birds and 100,000 mammals each year (1) – who choke or starve when they eat our plastic garbage. But plastic also kills another way, by acting as a sponge for waterborne contaminants. PCBs, DDT and other toxins concentrate in polymers and then make their way up the food chain, affecting all the animals – including us – that ingest them.

Though some 11 billion metric tons of plastic makes its way to the ocean each year (2), Haseltine Pozzi notes that the red plastic used in her fish sculpture is the “most difficult to find washed ashore, as research shows it is the color of plastic most often mistaken as food by marine creatures.” (3)

1. (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/oceanissues/plastics_albatross/)
2. http://plasticpollutioncoalition.org/learn/common-misconceptions/
3. http://www.washedashore.org/