Logbook — Day 1
I picked you up almost by chance. Or perhaps not by chance at all. There you were, a little plastic bear, your body marked by some unknown odyssey, like a memento the sea had spat back out. I rinsed you off, and as I turned you over between my fingers, you, this bleached scrap of plastic, gone rough with salt, a question came to me: but wait, Orsolino, are you litter?
Litter. A word we use lightly, for anything we no longer want to see. But a toy like you, once cuddled, once given with love, perhaps, can it really be filed under that word? And what does it actually mean, to become marine litter?
You weren't born in the ocean. You're not a fish, not a strand of seaweed, not a shell. You're a creature of plastic, born on a factory line and wrapped in glossy film. Then you were bought, given away, held tight in small hands.
And then one day you fell, or you were thrown out, or simply forgotten. A gust of wind, a burst of storm rain, a drain, a container that wasn't properly shut: it hardly matters how. One day you left dry land, and the sea carried you off. You drifted with no destination, and here you are, on this lonely beach, far from the world you came from.
Marine litter: a hazy definition, a very concrete reality
You're part of a vast procession, Orsolino. A procession that is silent, filthy, sometimes invisible. Marine litter is the name we give to any solid, durable material, made or shaped by human hands, that ends up discarded or abandoned at sea or along the coast. The first things that come to mind are plastic bags, bottles, nets. But there are also toothbrushes, toys, pens, phones , and those odd, single shoes you find lying alone on the sand.
Nearly 80% of marine litter comes from the land. It floats, it sinks, or it slowly breaks apart until it turns into microplastic. Some of it will end up in the belly of a bird; some of it, like you, will come back to look at us in silence.
How long would you have stayed there? They say a plastic toy can take more than four hundred years to disappear. But is “disappear” really the right word? You don't truly decompose. You crumble, very slowly, into smaller and smaller pieces that seep into the sand and the water, and into the bodies of living things.
If I hadn't picked you up, you would have become invisible particles: in the plankton, then in a fish, then on a plate. And we would have forgotten you were ever a toy.
And now? Here you are, Orsolino. You forced me to see what I no longer wanted to ignore: our objects have a memory, and our system has its cracks. What we call “litter” is often just a mirror of our choices, and of everything we let ourselves forget.
You are not just an object washed ashore. You are a question, still afloat.