One of the finalist photographs in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 shows the “jarring embrace” between a seahorse and a cotton bud. Legambiente comments on the link between our bad habits and the sea.
The seahorse is an endangered species; plastic in the sea is a "new" species that is expanding. We could read this jarring embrace between a hippocampus and a cotton bud in exactly that way.
The photo by Justin Hofman, taken in Indonesia, is among the finalists of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017, one of the most prestigious awards in the world for nature photography. Nature photography, precisely. Not even this competition can ignore the greatest emergency facing the world's seas and oceans: waste. Nor does it ignore the close correlation between our bad habits, our lifestyle, our way of consuming and "discarding," and the incalculable consequences that reverberate on our seas and on the delicate balance of biodiversity. A biodiversity that is fragile and severely threatened. It is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in our seas. More urgently than ever, a strong response is needed from the world's governments, which are called upon to adopt serious and immediate measures to reverse course, intervening primarily on waste management upstream, on the legislative and production framework, and on awareness campaigns.
It may be a coincidence, but among the thousands of plastic objects floating in our seas, the cotton bud is perhaps among the most representative of the correlation between our bad habits and the sea. All the waste that ends up in the sea gets there because human beings have been unable to manage it upstream. Cotton buds reach it in a very direct way, because they are flushed down the toilets in our homes, making their way to the sea also due to inefficient purification systems.
To some it may seem obvious to reiterate that no waste should be flushed down the toilet (even if it says "biodegradable"). It may seem obvious, but we can assure you there is still a great need to say it. In fact, 10 per cent of waste found on Italian beaches consists of cotton buds — almost seven thousand pieces found on 46 beaches monitored by Legambiente between 2016 and 2017, one every step of the way. These are the figures that prompted Legambiente and Ogilvy Change to create the #Norifiutinelwc campaign, to inform and raise awareness among citizens, but also to call for a law that would ban the sale of plastic cotton buds in favour of compostable alternatives.
And we hope that, in future editions, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year will once again be able to award underwater shots just as beautiful as this one, but less contaminated by plastic and our waste.