Plastic Whale https://plasticwhale.com is an organization that works to clean the canals of Amsterdam, to give the waste a new life, and to bring awareness to the plastic problem in the world's waters.
According to their website, their mission is:
Plastic Whale is the first professional plastic fishing company in the world. A social enterprise with a mission: make the world’s waters plastic-free and create value from plastic waste. It started in 2011 with a single challenge to build a boat made of plastic waste. Today, we have a fleet of ten design boats made from Amsterdam Canal Plastic. It is our goal to go ‘out of business’: overfishing is a positive phenomenon in our case. With your team, department or company you can help us achieve our goal: come plasticfishing with us on the canals of Amsterdam or at the Rotterdam harbour!
As an organization, they take volunteers “plastic fishing” for anything they can grab with a net, and then recycle the plastic bottles creating the boats they use, as well as furniture. The furniture designs are based on forms derived from the forms of whales https://plasticwhale.com/circular-furniture/. According to their website they go out on most days, with a special focus on days after Kings Day and Pride, huge city wide festivals. If you come to Amsterdam or Rotterdam, look up Plastic Whale!
The annual Pride Festival took place this in Amsterdam this past week. It’s an amazing festival, which takes over the majority of the city center. It’s incredibly moving to see an entire city as a safe space for a population that is not safe in so many places. The first time I saw the rainbow flag on Westerkerk was very moving.
Yesterday was the culminating event of Pride: the Canal Parade where themed boat-based floats sponsored by various entities take over the Prinsengracht. The city is ridiculously packed with revelers in fantastic costumes, celebrating and imbibing, generally blocking traffic and making many of us hide in the outer rings to avoid the noise and crowds. And there is a lot of plastic, empty beer cans, and tissue paper confetti left behind.
For the past 3 years, Plastic Whale has hosted a post Canal Parade clean up of the canals the day after. So much of my research into social design has been based on looking, reading, and talking, that I wanted to participate hands-on. Plus it is a free ride on the canals, a chance to meet locals, and oddly enough, I enjoy picking up litter.
We left from Het Scheepvaartmuseum (sadly not a museum full of art by sheep, but a maritime museum, which I highly recommend) around 2 pm. We had 2 hours with our nets to fish plastic from the canals. We passed the big whale tale (Moby Dick of Amsterdam), and headed to the Red Light District. Being a favorite area for tourists who want to imbibe, it was a sure bet for canal garbage.
My first catch was a few deflated balloons near Nemo Science Center. It was not long before we started hauling in plastic in many forms, along with a plethora of Heineken cans (Heineken really needs to sponsor Plastic Whale), and water bottles. We moved along the Oudezijds Voorburghwal canal, where many tourists and other boaters cheered us on, thanked us, donated their waste, and even assisted us in getting trash too close to the wall for us to access in our boat (we passed them our nets to help out). We worked together to sort the canal garbage, carefully removing the lids of bottles, which are used to line the bottom of new boats (they have created 10 so far from the plastic bottles they have gathered).
Of course it felt good to clean up the canals, and for me it felt nice to care for a little corner of a city that has given me so much joy. There also is that guilt inducing self-serving aspect to such acts. This was balanced by the cynicism that can shadow such work: a tourist boat driver who joked with his passengers that what we were doing was merely symbolic, the boat driver with a crew (including his boxer riding the front edge of the boat) who cursed us for being in his way (the driver, not the dog), and another boat driver who waved his hand dismissively when we missed getting a plastic bag.
When we got back to Het Scheepvaartmuseum we had 2+ bags of plastic bottles, 2+ bags of garbage (including glass and cans to be separated later), and 2+ bags of plastic bags, wrappers, and other non-bottle plastic, which will also be recycled. On the docks the bags piled up, but I left before we totals were announced. (They have since been shared and I posted them at the end of this blog).
There was a contest for the most bags of canal garbage gathered, as well as the strangest-things-found. Our donations to the weirdest-things-found were two matching sets of Invito shoes (fairly nice and pricey were they not soaked through with canal water), a hairbrush, and a plastic penis whistle (it was Pride after all). At the end of the Scheepvaartmuseum dock was also a city canal-cleaning barge with its giant claw, and scooping basket. The claw is often used to retrieve the over 10,000 bicycles that end up in the canal every year (many stolen), but today it looked like they focused on floating waste.
A list of some of our bounty:
-Plastic water bottles
-Beer cans (primarily Heineken)
-Chip bags
-Styrofoam food containers
-Paper food containers
-Wooden frites forks
-Sooo many cigarette butts
-Balloons
-Shoes
-Hairbrush
-Plastic bags and straws
-Full cans of beer and tonic
-Vodka bottles
-Styrofoam packing
-Weed bags
-Other dubious things
Some of the things that were in the competition for weirdest things found were:
-A suitcase
-A pretty awful painting
-Many water toys (including a large pink flamingo floaty)
-Our two sets of shoes
-A stuffed little mermaid (possibly against her will, she was born for the water!)
-Fairy wings
-Various penis toys and straws
-A camouflaged walky talky
-Pride signs and hats
-An unused bag of balloons
We were told to leave organic things and things too big for the net behind. This included quite a bit of watermelon, and at least one pigeon that had met his demise.
My first trip to Amsterdam was in 2013, and I remember all the garbage in the canals. Even since then there is a marked difference, and it is so much cleaner now. On warm days (which has been most of this summer), you even see people swimming in areas of the canals. I have no idea what percentage of this change is due to Plastic Whale, but it seems to me this is a case of the symbolic action adding to an awareness that made a visible difference.
At the end of this afternoon, I biked home to take a shower.
UPDATE! This just in from Plastic Whale
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