A sculpture of two life size whales made from willow and 70,000 plastic bottles has been unveiled in Bristol to mark the city’s status as the UK’s first European Green Capital.
The artwork, named The Bristol Whales, aims to represent the fragility of oceans and the threat of plastic pollution, particularly plastic bags and food and drink packaging.
It features a blue whale and a humpback whale swimming through an ‘ocean’ of plastic bottles, collected from the Bristol Half Marathon and Bristol 10k race.
The six-tonne sculpture also consists of willow harvested from nearby Somerset, which will naturally biodegrade over time.
Sue Lipscombe, managing director of Cod Steaks, which designed and built the artwork, said: “Whales are intelligent, beautiful, charismatic animals – they’ve become symbols of the world’s oceans.
“They have a physical strength but they also represent resilience, the potential for recovery, provided we as custodians of the oceans take the right steps to protect them.
“We’re confident that this sculpture will fuel discussion and debate about plastics in the ocean.”
Britons spend more than £1.5 billon on bottled water each year, sending 15 million bottles to landfill each day.
Globally, 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in oceans each year, equivalent to the body weight of 45,000 blue whales.
The Bristol Whales will be situated in the city’s Millennium Square until September 1.
FM Comment:
The statistics immediately above are quite horrifying and testament to the abysmally low standards that prevail worldwide. Refreshingly, the article states quite specifically that Britain sends its 15,000,000 plastic bottles to landfill and that the ‘8 million tonnes’ that finds its way into our oceans is a global effort. That Great Britain harbours its fair share of environmentally unconscious types is a ‘given’ but, generally, this country and mainland Europe are a tidy lot who keep our beaches and shoreline relatively clean. It’s still nowhere near good enough but a few weeks travelling in regions seen by those of us in the northern hemisphere as ‘paradisical’ or ‘exotic’ soon reveals the lack of standards elsewhere in the world. It is an awful disappointment to find that otherwise interesting, friendly natives of idyllic regions have zero respect for their environment and that they are clearly happy to live within a junk-yard of their own making. Go to Central America, perhaps, to see countless examples of this. There, the real ferreting tourist will happen upon countless communities living in utter squalor in some of the world’s most desirable locations – were they clean!
He or she will wilt at the sight of bleach bottles and Coke tins, old flip-flops, carrier-bags, Bacardi bottles and all manner of trash bobbing about in the turquoise sea and lining the sun-bleached waterline. FM doesn’t seek to come up with a miracle solution in the space of a few lines; it merely wishes to point out that the emphasis placed at government level on oil-spills, industrial air and sea pollution and man-made global warming must not be allowed to overshadow the truly heinous crimes committed by individuals worldwide; their combined effect on Paradise Earth is every bit as bad and yet it is tolerated. Why then do the world’s authorities not lay down punishments commensurate with the crime? Do government ministers consider the discarded burger-box and the crisp packet too trivial to discuss? FM repeats its suggestion from a few weeks back: a dedicated Litter Police committed to swelling nations’ coffers through huge fines.
