Photographer vs Plastic
I spent a month in March 2019 travelling around the entire coast of Ireland documenting plastic pollution on Irish beaches.
The project came about after I read a 2018 World Economic Forum finding that said ‘The European country creating the most plastic waste per citizen is Ireland, with an average of 61kg thrown away each year.’ This shocked me as I remembered Ireland being the first country in the EU to introduce the plastic bag levy in 2002. I had the impression that Ireland was ahead of the game from an environmental point of view.
I am a great lover of the ocean and at the time of the project, there was a lot of public discussion about ocean plastic pollution. I wanted to see to what extent Ireland, an island nation, had a problem with plastic pollution on its shores.
Along the way, I interviewed sea users and scientists to understand what the ocean meant to them, I did regular beach cleans and I documented what I saw (at times arranging the plastic before photographing it).