Thousands of bright pink detergent bottles have washed ashore on the southwest coast of England, making the beach look a bit like Susan G. Komen shit all over it.
While the source of the bottles hasn’t been verified, the BBC reports that they may have come from a container ship full of Vanish detergent that was lost at sea last May. And they sure look like Vanish to us:
Whatever the source, the bottles should feel right at home: There are an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash in the oceans (and counting!).
The Cornwall Wildlife Trust has raised concerns about the impact of the detritus on marine life. “The main worry is all that detergent going into our beautiful marine environment, but thankfully most [bottles] are full,” the National Trust’s Justin Whitehouse told the BBC. And there are a lot of bottles. “We were frantically trying to collect them all up and then the Maritime Coastguard Agency sent a helicopter out and discovered that actually there’s whole rafts of them that are likely to be coming our way,” Whitehouse said.
The National Trust is clearing away the bottles, and has asked people to stay away.” In the meantime the public are advised to keep children and dogs at a safe distance from the bottles should any more be washed up,” said a representative from the Cornwall Council. “No attempt should be made to recover the bottles.”
This is one problem we wish would just … Vanish.
