- This isn't the story I expected to tell.
I knew, coming here, that this isn't some magic beach
where you can bring a shovel and scoop up buckets and buckets of Lego.
It might've felt a bit like that twenty years ago,
but these days Lego is a little harder to find.
But yes, here on the coast of Cornwall, in the south-west of England,
when the conditions are right,
you might find quite a bit of Lego scattered on Perranporth beach.
In 1997, a container ship called Tokio Express
was on its way to New York when it got hit by a heavy storm
off Land's End, just west of here.
A load of containers got knocked into the sea.
And one of them contained almost 5 million little plastic pieces of Lego.
Most of which were ocean themed.
Flippers, spears, octopuses,
all crashing around in the waves and currents.
The far end of this beach has the right conditions.
There's a huge expanse of sand,
the wind is in the right direction,
but the pieces can wash up anywhere.
That's the nice, cute story that I was going to tell.
- We find the Lego after high spring tides and winter storms.
And that's when the waves will eat into the dunes
and release a lot of the plastic that's been washed ashore many years ago.
- That's Tracey Williams.
She's been beachcombing here for years
and runs a photography project called Lego Lost at Sea.
Tracey didn't want to be on camera,
which is frankly sensible.
But she was nice enough to show off some of her Lego collection,
to take me beachcombing here on the far end of the beach,
and to chat about what she's found over the years.
So I got my GoPro ready. We went out for a walk on the shore.
And that's where the story I thought I was going to tell
didn't work anymore.
When you've got it in a little jar
[Tracy laughs]
with all the bright colours, it looks almost quaint.
And then the reality is a bit different.
- No, the reality is horrifying, isn't it?
So if you look here, see.
- Absolutely full.
- So this is actually a plastic pebble.
- Plastic? - Yeah.
- How can you tell the difference? - Feel the weight.
- Oh, huh!
- Nobody really knows where they're coming from,
but they're thought to be the remains of beach bonfires.
So I've actually picked up 20,000 of those.
It's actually from an ale cask.
These are from packaging strips.
These are what they put round cartons to protect them from packaging.
Shotgun wads, shotgun cartridges. Bottle caps.
- I mean, what do you do with...
like, you've just got to bring a trash bag and just...
- Yeah, so I normally come down armed with sacks.
That's a glow stick from fishing.
So that's the valve off a tyre. - Oh yeah!
- So these get discarded on garage forecourts and tyre places,
and they just get washed into the drains. - And the drains go straight to the sea.
- A lot will be litter dropped on the streets.
80% of litter dropped on the streets
is said to make its way to the sea. - Wow.
It's not just Lego, that's the way people like to tell it
but it's not just Lego.
It's so many plastic things and it's not just this beach.
Once you start looking... immediately, bright white,
bright blue, bright yellow. - Yeah.
- If I was looking at this from a distance,
I would have just read it all as seaweed.
- It's actually not as bad today,
as it sometimes is,
but I can't see how it's ever going to get better
in a way it's a sort of pointless exercise,
constantly picking it up.
- I've just got a sort-of creeping horror at this point.
Do you get used to that?
- Get used to seeing this amount of plastic?
- Yeah. - That's bleak.
- There's this cliché in horror movies,
where the characters suddenly realise that the monster that they've heard about,
this abstract thing, is actually
in the room with them and has been there the whole time,
and that's kind of what this felt like,
because I've been going to beaches like this all my life
and I'd never noticed the bright colours that were right in front of me.
- So on this beach, you get a lot of the floating plastic.
So you've got all the fragments of plastic.
You got the nurdles, these little tiny nurdles.
- Those aren't stones? Those are...
- No, these are little plastic nurdles.
These are the raw material that all plastic items are made from.
There's billions of them.
So some are nurdles.
You also get ones that are black and ridged
and they're actually biobeads that are used
in waste-water treatment plants.
- And then you sort-of pull back the camera and you realise that it's all of this.
There's so much of it.
- On some beaches, you get the plastic that sinks to the ocean floor
and it washes ashore with the kelp, with the brown seaweed.
They've probably been swirling around the seabed
for the last 24 years,
and every now and again they wash ashore with the seaweed.
- And this goes down, then?
- We assume it does.
- So a lot of it is is buried under where we are now. Just needs to come out.
- Quite a lot of the toys we find, you can date them.
And some date back to the 50s and 60s.
Especially the cereal packet toys.
We recently did some experiments in the lab
to see how long Lego would last in the marine or coastal environments,
and the scientists that did the experiments worked out
that it could last up to 1300 years.
I wonder if one day you'll just be able to recognise it by the colour.
- Yeah. - That's bleak.
- Bright green of the seaweed or the yellow of the lifeboats.
Ah, look, treasure!
- Treasure? Is that one of the dwarves from Snow White?
It's not every beach, but it's a lot of them.
Tucked away in corners where the tourists don't go
or just in plain sight.
There was seaweed on another beach filled with plastic.
Once you see it...!
- I've just seen a Lego broom.
- Yes. Just there?
- Yes.
- What do you know? Thank you.
Among all the other plastic waste, there still is Lego washing up.
Did they used to be more Lego? Has it changed over the years?
- Yes. I think there's definitely less Lego than there used to be.
And there's lots of people looking out for it now.
You only ever see what floats really.
You never really hear about all the items from cargo spills
that sink to the bottom of the sea.
- Because the rest of it is going to be out on the ocean floor somewhere.
- Yeah. - That's bleak.
[both laugh]
I don't have a neat ending for the story.
I was going to say, "Oh, if you're on the beach in south-west England,
!it's worth keeping your eyes down from time to time.
"Maybe you'll see some Lego!"
But even if you don't,
maybe take a bag with you and take some plastic away,
because there's a lot of it.
The Lego Lost at Sea project is on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,
and there's also a link to pre-order Tracey's book
down in the description.
[chuckles]
If I looked slightly distracted during that
it's because halfway through I realised that there is
green nylon rope just in the seaweed,
just hanging out there.