Still Lego-ing

DAMN YOU, IRONIC UNIVERSE!

It’s remarkable that children born in 1997 are now at university or working, whilst simultaneously wearing trousers with lots of artificial tears and frayed bits on their legs.

They were also born in the year that 62 containers went overboard from the Tokio Express after the cargo ship encountered a particularly large wave off the Cornish coast. One of the containers contained Lego kits. In a fine piece of cosmic black humour, many of the pieces were marine-themed.

A recent beach clean at St Bees saw one of the 4.8 million pieces collected. 320 miles from it’s original visit to the briny depths, and 21 years later, the Lego seagrass piece washed up in Cumbria.

Cute. Until you consider that all the other pieces are probably still intact and bobbing around, all these years later. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to tracking where they wash up, which reports that a flipper may have made it all the way to Melbourne, Australia.

Drift patterns also appear to have carried some Lego octopuses to Texas. It will be hundreds of years before these toy pieces break down, but continue to pollute the oceans in microscopic fragments.

If it was just toy bricks and associated paraphernalia that would be bad enough. But think of all the other plastic crap that winds up in our seas. A 2012 estimate suggested there are around 165 million tonnes of the stuff languishing in our oceans.

Entanglement, ingestion, toxins – it’s destroying the inhabitants of the Big Blue.

It’s about time we found a lasting way to Lego of our dependence on plastics.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 2nd of February 2018, where it was re-titled as "Lego flotsam's building up trouble".

I must be slipping - all three articles were re-titled by the paper. Apparently, the word 'crap' is too 'out there' too, as my use of it was replaced by the word 'rubbish' in print.

(CD A-Z: Midge Ure - "Intimate Moments".)