What sort of plastic stuff have you seen littering island beaches? Water bottles on the sand at Drumbeg? Toys tangled in seaweed at Whalebone? Food containers on the tide line at Sandwell?

Apparently the problem of plastic in the ocean is a huge one. There’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is enough to give me nightmares. And CBC says that Plastic garbage in oceans is ‘vastly’ underestimated.

Now on to a small bit of good news: the The Sea Chair Project Turns Fishermen Into Chair-makers and Rids the Ocean of Plastic Waste.

The first Sea Chair was launched at this year’s Milan Design Week and produced with plastic collected from Porthowan Beach in the UK with the help of the custom made Sea Press. All the machinery and collection tools are refurbished agricultural machinery sourced from salvage yards, re-envisaged and adapted for the purpose of harvesting plastic. [continue]

Hmm. Maybe we should harvest plastic from Gabriola beaches and make chairs (or something) out of that.

See also: The Sea Chair Project.