Ran across Zack Grant’s Silly Little Plastic Cat on Colossal last night. I really enjoyed it.
I’d heard about the phenomena before: Since the early 1980s, pieces of bright orange #Garfield telephones have been washing up on the beaches of #Brittany. Locals have collected thousands of them, and in some cases use them for decor.
Rather than being frustrated at the defacing of their shoreline with cartoon #junk, most Bretons seem to have developed an add sort of affection for Garfield—at least the phone version of him—and have adopted him as a local mascot. It’s a strange combination: a part of #France known for its rustic, unchanging nature, represented by a creation that’s as iconic a part of American kitschy consumerism as Mickey Mouse.
Cute it might be, but Grant doesn’t shy from the larger, unsettling reality of the Garfield phenomena: the phones are still emerging decades later because plastic is forever. “The electronics are melted into the rocks now,” one man says. In 2019, a local farmer revealed the source of these things: a shipping container lodged in a mostly inaccessible cave along the coast.
As a couple people point out, if the contents of a single shipping container can pollute a shoreline for forty years, imagine the impact from however many hundreds are lost at sea each year. Another resident sums up what the unending tide of Garfield phones really is: “…catastrophic toxic #waste [and] an ecological time bomb.”