Modern art is (made from) rubbish

It's been an arty week for me. After the polar bear sculptures in the US, an outdoor art group in Devon - Trail Recycled Art in Landscape (Trail) - has made a trawler boat out of 5,000 plastic bags and named it Rainbow Worrier after our legendary ship the Rainbow Warrior. They even filled it up with plastic fish in fishing nets to highlight how plastic is destroying marine ecosystems.

Plastic waste isn't just what you see on beaches and coast lines. A plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean as large as Texas is constantly swirling in a massive gyre that is referred to as the 'trash vortex'. Other unflattering names include Asian trash trail and the Eastern Garbage Patch where six kilos of plastic swirls for every kilo of plankton.

How did so much plastic reach the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Well, 10 per cent of the 100 million tonnes of plastic that is produced each year is dumped in the sea mainly from ships and platforms. Winds and currents keep the plastic from drifting to beaches thus missing out on any chance of being picked up, leaving the plastic perpetually in the vortex.

Of course, plastic doesn't degenerate easily like organic materials and stays in the marine environment for a long time merely breaking into small parts and spreading to other parts of the ocean. The biggest threat is to seabirds and marine animals that eat the plastic mistaking it for food and eventually die as a result. Large numbers of animals also get trapped in abandoned plastic nets and lines.

On top of that, many other pollutants in the ocean are absorbed by plastic poisoning marine life that come into contact - some organisms cling on to floating bits of plastic and spread the toxins to other parts of the ocean. Most plastic eventually sinks to the bottom of the ocean where tonnes of rubbish stifle deep sea creatures. We can do our bit by using as little plastic as possible and recycling whatever we can to prevent it from ending up in the vortex.

The Rainbow Worrier is an excellent example of using art to raise awareness which won Trail the Recycled Art in Landscape Public Choice Award. Who said art wasn't meaningful?