Tregantle Beach in southwest England looks like paradise on a spring Sunday, but beneath the sand lurks a silent invader: plastic microbeads. These tiny, transparent pellets, the size of a lentil, are used to make plastic objects, but they easily escape during transport and handling and end up polluting the oceans and beaches. Some 11.5 trillion microbeads end up in the ocean each year, according to the organization Fauna & Flora. Birds and other sea creatures mistake them for fish eggs and eat them, affecting the entire food chain.
Rob Arnold, an environmental activist, engineer, and committed artist, has created a special machine to separate plastic waste from natural waste and sand and now uses the microbeads and other microplastics to create artwork and raise awareness in schools. While some of the microplastics are given to Arnold for his artistic creations and some are used to raise awareness in schools, the rest that cannot be recycled end up in the garbage or are incinerated, which ends up polluting the air.
After three hours of cleanup, volunteers have cleared only a few square meters of Tregantle Beach, which has hundreds of them. Arnold has collected nearly a million pieces of microplastic from the beach and turned them into a sculpture measuring more than 1.7 meters that is on display at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall. Arnold says his sculpture is a metaphor for what we are doing to planet Earth. If we destroy it, we will have nowhere to go. For his next creation, he would like to make a meteorite heading toward Earth as a nod to the meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, because that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Arnold seems disillusioned after the beach cleanup and says he sometimes thinks about throwing all his bags of microplastics into the river off a bridge to make people realize how serious the problem is.