Social Action 

In areas around the pacific, people rely on fishing to make money and to feed their families. In 2019, artist Tom Barnes visited Indonesia to photograph how the rubbish was impacting fishers in the area. They discussed how the plastic makes it hard to catch fish, quite often their nets will fill up with litter instead of fish. The number of fish are dropping in the area because of the rise in litter and the conditions of the water. This makes it hard for them to earn money selling fish.

Here is how Tom describes walking along the beach:

"After meeting the local fishers and hearing their stories we walked around taking in the scale of the rubbish – we knew it would be bad, but we weren’t expecting three feet of extra coastline, comprising of matted nets and discarded ropes. My crew and I were all wearing armoured wellington boots. It felt odd walking on a beach in such industrial footwear, but there was broken glass, burning nappies, plastic and bags wrapping around our thick ankles as we walked on the ‘sand’ and through the water.

Children were running around and playing football on the rotting piles. They must have been somewhere between six and nine years old and I suddenly realised that they had never know this as a clean beach – the rubbish had been completely normal for their entire lives. As I was walking up the beach with my team, one of the children cut his foot on glass whilst running after the ball barefoot. That memory is burnt into my mind, the child clutching his bleeding foot surrounded by rubbish and burning plastic. Children should be able to play on the beach without any worry of injuring themselves."