It is 2 p.m. on this spring Sunday, the sun illuminates Whitsand Bay in Cornwall. Below the cliffs, the spectacular beach of Tregantle. The dazzling light is reminiscent of a painting by Turner: sea, sky, sun, everything blends together in this seemingly heavenly setting.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? But look under your feet,” says Rob Arnold, 65, environmental activist, engineer and committed artist. He crouches down and extracts tiny plastic balls, “nurdles”, sometimes nicknamed “mermaid’s tears”, from the sand.
Most often transparent, the size of a lentil, these microbeads are used in principle to make plastic objects.
But like crude oil, they escape easily during transport and handling, and are persistent pollutants, also absorbing other pollutants.
Some 11.5 trillion nurdles end up in the ocean each year, according to UK charity Fauna
“Because of their size and shape, birds and other sea creatures mistake them for fish eggs and eat them. If an animal that has ingested nurdles is in turn eaten by another, that’s the food chain that is affected,” explains Rob Arnold.
That day, about ten people take part in the cleaning of the beach, including Rob and the special machine he invented, consisting of a large plastic basin, a large grid and a tube system.
“It separates plastic waste from natural waste and sand thanks to a filtering and water flotation system”, explains to AFP the former engineer with a mischievous gaze, who then uses nurdles and other microplastics to make works of art.
Jed Louis, 58, in a khaki hoodie flocked with the name of the local beach clean-up association, watches the scene.
“This beach is particularly polluted because of its geographical location, the currents and its very open shape to the sea,” he explains. “It is in autumn and winter, because of the weather, that we find the most microplastics on the beaches: storms, thunderstorms and winds bring them to the surface. Unfortunately the plastic remains, it does not disappear. not”.
For Claire Wallerstein, 53, “sometimes it’s a bit like doing archeology. If we dig the sand, we will find different layers of plastic”.
A portion of these microbeads is given to Rob Arnold for his artistic creations. Another is used to raise awareness in schools.
But the rest, impossible to recycle, ends up in the trash and is incinerated. “So plastic and its chemicals end up in the air,” Claire laments.
After three hours, the volunteers will have cleaned just a few square meters of Tregantle beach, which adds up to hundreds.
Rob Arnold looks at his loot: a large, several-meter tarp filled with nurdles and other microplastics.
Once dried and re-sorted, he can add them to the 20 million nurdles he has collected in six years, and which he stores in a friend’s garage.
– The Art of Denouncing –
From these nurdles, Rob Arnold makes works of art. With nearly a million nurdles and small pieces of plastic collected on the beach, he notably created a sculpture of more than 1m70, similar to the Moai statues of Easter Island, with a mysterious past.
She is on display at the Cornish National Maritime Museum in Falmouth as ‘A Lesson in History’.
“It’s a metaphor for what we are doing to our planet earth. We are polluting it, using all its resources. If we destroy it, we will have nowhere to go,” he said.
For his next creation, he would like to make a meteorite in nurdles that is heading towards the earth “like a nod to the meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, because (…) that’s exactly what we are doing. Like the meteorite, we are destroying our planet”.
After cleaning up the beach, as he puts his bags away, he looks disillusioned.
“Sometimes I think about throwing all my bags of nurdles into the river from a bridge. It would be so shocking that maybe, finally, people would realize.”
09/04/2023 07:45:54 – Millbrook (Royaume-Uni) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
