Narrator (1984 doc)
This is Dee River, just south of Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast. The first storm of the season just rolled in the night before, and volunteers up and down the coast are facing gale winds and high seas as they begin their search for the plastic debris.
Anja Krieger
Welcome to Plastisphere, the podcast on plastics, people and the planet. My name is Anja Kriger. In this episode, we’re going to head out to the beach for International Coastal Cleanup Day. It’s a huge event, which has been taking place each third Saturday of September for four decades now. Each year that day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm to the shorelines and collect and remove the trash they find. But beyond just cleaning up, International Coastal Cleanup Day is an important part of the science and politics of plastics. But how did it all begin? In the next two episodes, you’ll get to hear the little-known stories of the women who started the beach cleanups in the 1980s. These early activists did not only mobilize citizens to put a global spotlight on plastic pollution, they were also the first to count and classify the trash, which produced invaluable data to better understand the growing environmental issue plastics posed. And right from the beginning, beach cleanups drew the interest of the plastics and packaging industries. They got entangled in the blame game between society and industry. We’ll explore this history in more detail with Elsa Devienne. Elsa is an assistant professor in US history at Northumbria University in the UK, and she’s the one who dug up this story. Continue reading “Transcript: The early heroines of plastic pollution, part 1: Judie”