Amid the rugged, wave-churned shoreline of France’s Breton coast, a surprising tidbit of pop culture has kept beachcombers returning for more than 40 years. The short film “” transports us to this slice of Brittany, where local residents grew up collecting parts of a 1984 Garfield-themed plastic telephone on the beach—and still do. Photographer and director , founder the production studio , was intrigued by the story, which made news a few years back after of the dispersed merchandise was finally discovered.
The part of Brittany where the phones wash up is situated along a busy shipping thoroughfare. At some point during their transit in the mid-1980s, the shipping container carrying thousands of the units fell into the sea, and over the years, its spilled contents have continued to arrive in distinctively orange, tangled jumbles. As quirky as it is, the phenomenon also shines a light on the less humorous side: the vast quantity of garbage that washes ashore.
To put the scale of pollution into perspective, nearly 1,500 shipping containers were alone. Less than 10 percent of those were recovered; the rest are still missing. It’s a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of containers transported annually, yet a single 40-foot container could hold the contents of an entire three- or four-bedroom house or around 400 mattresses. Multiply that by several hundred and consider everything we ship—clothing, medical supplies, car parts, you name it—and we can start to scratch the surface of the oceans’ staggering .
“Silly Little Plastic Cat” illuminates the reality of pollution and also highlights how locals are motivated to help. Residents have adopted Garfield as something of a de facto mascot for cleanup projects. “We are 100 percent responsible for the current climate situation and current pollution,” says a local conservationist who aids in beach cleanups via . “We are also actors in the solutions.” Another initiative invites people to work together to regenerate older or damaged items, making them usable once again while reducing consumption.
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