The Plastic Project

The Plastic Project - What is it?

It’s an adventure into the fringe of known coastlines in Europe, with two goals, one to keep inspiring people about what an amazing world we live on and secondly to highlight the out of control situation we face with marine litter, specifically in the North Atlantic. I’m a photographer so by documenting, talking about and making people open their eyes to the problem through images is the best way I know of doing this. It’s a non statistical, purely visual way of representing what a huge problem marine litter is to the environment.

It all started whilst I was shooting my book Numb, myself and buddy Ian Battrick spent six years living rough in Scotland, Norway, Iceland and Canada. Having full on wilderness adventures, getting caught in volcanic eruptions, dealing with extreme weather, finding epic waves and going to places of astounding natural beauty. It was epic, but after a while I realised it didn't matter how out of the way I got, there was still marine litter, sometimes on the beach sometimes in the water and at times up to four feet deep on the beach.

It was everything from plastic to oil drums, Coke bottles to McDonalds cartons, in places where they had obviously had to travel thousands of miles to get to. Once back I started giving talks around my adventures to full houses, not just of surfers either, and I started to talk about the litter we found everywhere. Immediately folk were engaged, and it was obvious this was a great way to get the message across, and it is a very serious one.

The problem with a lot of very good environmental causes is they reel off stats at people, like there are 40-50k pieces of marine litter in every square mile of the Atlantic, that's a lot but when mixed in with the overwhelming stats of doom and gloom in everyday life it gets lost. But by showing images of amazing places, linking it in with surf, and adventure and you then have a captive audience. This is all about helping to spread the word on the problem, show people what an amazing world we are damaging and hopefully inspiring people to do something about it and making them realise they are the solution.

The great thing is photographers like myself now have the platform to achieve this, through sites like this, thanks to sponsorship help as well and doing slideshows and talks, it all helps connect and I think if you can inspire one person, they can then inspire their friends. It is a problem we can all solve simply by not using plastics and other packaging when we don’t need to and when we do making sure it gets recycled.