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Ocean Trash Art Show Opens at UVA

A surprising art show opens Friday, August 25,  at the University of Virginia – 16 pieces of sculpture crafted from ocean trash.  

Each year, the world throws ten million tons of plastic into its oceans. To understand just how much that is, imagine finding five grocery bags full of plastic bottles, plates, cups and straws for every foot of coast.  And then there are plastic fishing nets that are thrown away or get caught on the ocean floor – breaking free from boats.

“They continue to catch fish long after they’ve been abandoned or they break away, and they don’t biodegrade," says Steve Macko,  a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

"Plastics in the ocean will last 300 years.”

In the Science and Engineering Library, he studies 16 sculptures of animals suspended from the ceiling.  They were made from so-called ghost nets and other plastics that washed up on Australian beaches where aboriginal artists used them to sculpt rare sea turtles, sharks, rays, mammals and birds. Macko says it’s difficult to find these nets in our vast oceans and costly to retrieve them.

“It’s very expensive to recapture a net that has drifted across a coral reef for example. You’re talking many thousands of dollars, because you have to have divers that go down, and then it takes a long time to actually untangle it from all the things that are there,” he explains.

So he, and the artists who created this show, are hoping to raise awareness around the world – to inspire new laws and rules for fishing and reporting ghost nets.  Macko and the curator of the Kluge Ruhe Aborginal Art Museum in Charlottesville will lecture on the subject Friday at 4 in Clark Hall -- 291 McCormick Road.  A reception will follow from 5-7 p.m.

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief