Banksy’s Dismaland

“We [the governments of the world] know what we need to do [to fight Global Warming], and we’re willing to do roughly half that.” — Naomi Klein, on the Paris Accords ¹

A November 21 article in the New York Times by Daniel Victor discussed a sperm whale found off the coast of Indonesia with more than a 1,000 pieces of plastic in it². (Warning: the video in the article is quite graphic. Do watch it.) The article also featured the following tweet in Indonesian that, thanks to the BBC³ and The Hindu⁴, I was able to translate it as follows:

Source: https://twitter.com/WWF_ID/status/1064667497733844992

The whale had 5.9kg of plastic debris within it:

  • hard plastic, 19 pieces: 140g
  • plastic bottles, 4 pieces: 150g
  • plastic bags, 25 pieces: 260g
  • flip-flops, 2 pieces: 270g and
  • a sack with more than 1,000 pieces of string: 3.26kg

In India, the state of Tamil Nadu is banning plastic bags (260g of 5.9kg, i.e. 4.4% of the problem) but not other plastic items.

Go figure.