Point No Point, WA – It wasn’t just sand clinging to the children’s toes as they climbed along enormous Puget Sound-worn logs on a Northwest beach at the tip of Kitsap Peninsula. Tiny balls of styrofoam, colorful bits of microplastic, and 2 mm-wide plastic discs, called “nurdles”, industrial feedstock for all plastics, made up 1/5 of the beach-scape that day. It was early February, 2010, and as we, the two mothers of the children, looked closer, it became obvious that the entire beach was littered with plastics, both large and small. Our 2 families, homeschooling our kids, ages 4-7, on Bainbridge Island, began collecting the plastics in our beach bags and a 2 year-long study of marine debris was launched.
We returned to Point No Point throughout that winter and continued to collect the plastic debris, 15 minutes at a time, across approximately 100 meters of beach. The children then inventoried and categorized the plastics by kind and color, and then got to work turning them into pieces of art. What became immediately clear was that the source of the plastics is our homes, our towns, and our construction sites.
Recent attention on the problem of plastic in the oceans has focused on the North Pacific Central Gyre, the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” of plastics believed to be twice the size of Texas. Yet, the problem of human-generated plastics in the ocean is alarmingly easy to document even closer to home. Plastics are washing up on our beaches with every high tide and this disturbing trend of plastic flotsam washing back up on land was the focus of Plastic is Forever, the project we designed as an educational display of mosaics, assemblages, and sculptures we created to illustrate the very real threat and impact marine debris is having on our waters near home.
We’ve set about finding a way to address the problem at its root, not just for our local community, but for our shared global community. How could we stop the flow of trash from our hands to our landfills and incinerators, and along the way unintentionally to the oceans?
Trash Backwards is our answer. We publish original content aimed at helping people rethink their old stuff, finding new ways to refuse, reduce, and reuse what’s already in existence so that less virgin material needs to be consumed for production of new stuff. We have also developed a database of rethink, reduce, reuse, and recycle solutions from around the world, and we’re developing a web tool and mobile app to share this resource widely.
If you have information that you’d like to add to our database and web tool, please let us know. We are always adding new solutions for our collective stuff, and we’d love to share your reuse tutorials, links to non-profits that collect and reuse materials, upcycled products, or other resources. Help us turn our communal trash backwards into something useful.