- This isn't the story I expected to tell. I knew, coming here, that this
isn't some magic beach where you can bring a shovel and
scoop up buckets and buckets of Lego. It might've felt a bit like that
twenty years ago, but these days Lego is
a little harder to find. But yes, here on the coast of Cornwall,
in the south-west of England, when the conditions are right, you might find quite a bit of Lego
scattered on Perranporth beach. In 1997, a container ship
called Tokio Express was on its way to New York
when it got hit by a heavy storm off Land's End,
just west of here. A load of containers got
knocked into the sea. And one of them contained almost 5 million
little plastic pieces of Lego. Most of which were ocean themed. Flippers, spears, octopuses, all crashing around in
the waves and currents. The far end of this beach
has the right conditions. There's a huge expanse of sand, the wind is in the right direction, but the pieces can wash up anywhere. That's the nice, cute story
that I was going to tell. - We find the Lego after high spring tides
and winter storms. And that's when the waves
will eat into the dunes and release a lot of the plastic that's
been washed ashore many years ago. - That's Tracey Williams. She's been beachcombing here for years and runs a photography project
called Lego Lost at Sea. Tracey didn't want to be on camera, which is frankly sensible. But she was nice enough to show off
some of her Lego collection, to take me beachcombing here
on the far end of the beach, and to chat about what
she's found over the years. So I got my GoPro ready.
We went out for a walk on the shore. And that's where the story I
thought I was going to tell didn't work anymore. When you've got it in a little jar [Tracy laughs] with all the bright colours,
it looks almost quaint. And then the reality is a bit different. - No, the reality is horrifying, isn't it? So if you look here, see. - Absolutely full. - So this is actually a plastic pebble. - Plastic?
- Yeah. - How can you tell the difference?
- Feel the weight. - Oh, huh! - Nobody really knows
where they're coming from, but they're thought to be the
remains of beach bonfires. So I've actually picked
up 20,000 of those. It's actually from an ale cask. These are from packaging strips. These are what they put round cartons
to protect them from packaging. Shotgun wads, shotgun cartridges.
Bottle caps. - I mean, what do you do with... like, you've just got to bring a
trash bag and just... - Yeah, so I normally come
down armed with sacks. That's a glow stick from fishing. So that's the valve off a tyre.
- Oh yeah! - So these get discarded on
garage forecourts and tyre places, and they just get washed into the drains.
- And the drains go straight to the sea. - A lot will be litter dropped
on the streets. 80% of litter dropped on the streets is said to make its way to the sea.
- Wow. It's not just Lego,
that's the way people like to tell it but it's not just Lego. It's so many plastic things
and it's not just this beach. Once you start looking...
immediately, bright white, bright blue, bright yellow.
- Yeah. - If I was looking at
this from a distance, I would have just read it all as seaweed. - It's actually not as bad today, as it sometimes is, but I can't see how it's
ever going to get better in a way it's a sort
of pointless exercise, constantly picking it up. - I've just got a sort-of
creeping horror at this point. Do you get used to that? - Get used to seeing
this amount of plastic? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - There's this cliché in horror movies, where the characters suddenly realise
that the monster that they've heard about, this abstract thing, is actually in the room with them and has
been there the whole time, and that's kind of what this felt like, because I've been going to
beaches like this all my life and I'd never noticed the bright colours
that were right in front of me. - So on this beach,
you get a lot of the floating plastic. So you've got all the
fragments of plastic. You got the nurdles,
these little tiny nurdles. - Those aren't stones? Those are... - No, these are little plastic nurdles. These are the raw material
that all plastic items are made from. There's billions of them. So some are nurdles. You also get ones that
are black and ridged and they're actually
biobeads that are used in waste-water treatment plants. - And then you sort-of pull back the camera
and you realise that it's all of this. There's so much of it. - On some beaches, you get the plastic
that sinks to the ocean floor and it washes ashore with the kelp,
with the brown seaweed. They've probably been
swirling around the seabed for the last 24 years, and every now and again they
wash ashore with the seaweed. - And this goes down, then? - We assume it does. - So a lot of it is is buried under where
we are now. Just needs to come out. - Quite a lot of the toys we find,
you can date them. And some date back to the 50s and 60s. Especially the cereal packet toys. We recently did some
experiments in the lab to see how long Lego would last
in the marine or coastal environments, and the scientists that did
the experiments worked out that it could last up to 1300 years. I wonder if one day you'll just be able
to recognise it by the colour. - Yeah. - Bright green of the seaweed
or the yellow of the lifeboats. Ah, look, treasure! - Treasure? Is that one of
the dwarves from Snow White? It's not every beach,
but it's a lot of them. Tucked away in corners
where the tourists don't go or just in plain sight. There was seaweed on another
beach filled with plastic. Once you see it...! - I've just seen a Lego broom. - Yes. Just there? - Yes. - What do you know? Thank you. Among all the other plastic waste,
there still is Lego washing up. Did they used to be more Lego?
Has it changed over the years? - Yes. I think there's definitely less
Lego than there used to be. And there's lots of people
looking out for it now. You only ever see what floats really. You never really hear about
all the items from cargo spills that sink to the bottom of the sea. - Because the rest of it is going to be out
on the ocean floor somewhere. - Yeah.
- That's bleak. [both laugh] I don't have a neat ending for the story. I was going to say, "Oh, if you're
on the beach in south-west England, !it's worth keeping your
eyes down from time to time. "Maybe you'll see some Lego!" But even if you don't, maybe take a bag with you
and take some plastic away, because there's a lot of it. The Lego Lost at Sea project is on
Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and there's also a link
to pre-order Tracey's book down in the description. [chuckles] If I looked slightly distracted during that it's because halfway through
I realised that there is green nylon rope just in the seaweed, just hanging out there.
