Sea Turtle Trash Art Animals Getting Affected by Trash
Ocean trash turned into a affair of beauty
Artists create animal sculptures from plastics in the exhibit "Done Ashore."
Flash the marlin is a fine fish and a fine piece of trash. Continuing only exterior the National Zoo'southward visitor middle, he is poised, mouth open, to make a splash in a wave of turquoise line-fishing nets and clear plastic bottles. His gills, made from toilet seats, are rather muddy; his long neb, narrowing to a point that seems sharp enough to pierce a small fish — or at least a plastic trash bag — is made from iii angling rods.
His optics — well, if the eyes are a window into the soul, Flash's soul has seen better days. His creator, pointing to 1 of the sculpture's big silvery optics, says it was made from a mayonnaise hat, a beer can, a motor oil container and a silverish sandal. The socket was made from a deflated Cinderella beach ball.
Wink, an 850-pound sculpture made almost entirely of plastic trash that done up on Oregon beaches, is one of 17 larger-than-life marine sculptures that will be on display at the National Zoo starting Friday.
Fabricated by a team of artists and volunteers led by Angela Haseltine Pozzi, "Done Ashore," which volition run through September 5, is an fine art exhibition with a message. As Haseltine Pozzi (pronounced Hazel-teen POTS-ee) puts it: "Plastic pollution is just choking the ocean. Information technology'southward hurting the animals, and we take to alter our consumer habits."
A onetime art teacher from Washington state, Haseltine Pozzi grew upward spending summers at a cabin in the seaside town of Bandon, Oregon. She turned to the ocean subsequently the expiry of her husband, Craig Pozzi, from a encephalon tumor in 2004.
Ane afternoon a few years after her husband'due south decease, she looked downward at one of her favorite beaches and saw a line of "tiny niggling plastics" stretched across the shore "as far as your eye could run into." The plastic bits were pieces of trash that had done upward with the waves. Noticing beachcombers searching for shells further down the shore, she decided she needed to notice a way "to become those people to pick upwards that stuff" — trash, pounds and pounds of it.
[Discover out well-nigh the Smashing Pacific Garbage Patch in our story.]
Haseltine Pozzi, now 58, decided that turning trash into cute fine art, showing some of the animals nearly affected by ocean pollution, was the solution. In 2010 she founded Washed Aground, a nonprofit arrangement, and in the past six years, she says, the grouping has collected about 18 tons of garbage from more than 300 miles of Oregon coastline. With help from volunteers, the organization has made more than than 65 sculptures, with more on the way. The sculptures travel around the land — a dozen are on brandish at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta — while the trash continues to wash aground on beaches around the world.
How much plastic is in the body of water? Mary Hagedorn, a scientist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute who studies coral reefs in Hawaii, says it'south at to the lowest degree 315 billion pounds. These plastics are "having a huge impact on the animals," she says. Plastic nets can strangle turtles, fish and even coral. Tiny plastic bits — tossed by the waves and ground downward to go as tiny as grains of sand — can kill animals that mistakenly eat them.
The trash oftentimes makes it into the sea by flowing down rivers and sewer lines or by beingness blown into the h2o from landfills. Hagedorn and Haseltine Pozzi recommend recycling and using reusable bags instead of the plastic bags you might get at a store.
"Don't feel guilty" about all the plastics you utilize each day, Haseltine Pozzi says, "but take some action." If yous're not turning quondam fishing poles and toilet seats into art, yous can at least effort to recycle them or donate them.
"When you lot see everyone working together to make large things happen," she adds, "information technology just gives you faith that we can solve some of the tough problems."
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ocean-trash-turned-into-a-thing-of-beauty/2016/05/24/a3b3ed3e-0e27-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html
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