For years now I have been obsessed with the Instagram page @archeoplastica, which now has over 400K followers. But what is it about this format that fascinates me and all these people? It is «a project to raise awareness about the pollution of the sea caused by plastic, using old, beached rubbish», reads the bio in Italian. The project is in fact the brainchild of Enzo Suma, a young man from Puglia who has been working as a nature guide in Ostuni, in the province of Bari, for over ten years. On his Instagram page, almost every day he posts a video that immortalises a plastic object found on our beaches and tells its story, demonstrating – terrifyingly – how these products have been surviving in the sea for over fifty years, making who knows what journeys until they run aground on the shore. If you dig deeper, you end up on his website, literally a virtual museum that archives ‘a selection of finds’ that the sea has returned to us. But let’s find out more about this plastic design that populates our ‘paradisiacal’ beaches, so much so that a new discipline ‘the archaeology of plastic’ could be born.
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The mysterious Greek clown
From Apulia to Sardinia, no beach is exempt from this fantastic plastic design, and vintage to boot. Through Archeoplastica, it is interesting to discover the history of some of the products but, at the same time, it is chilling to see how they are so well preserved by the sea, as if we had just pulled them out of grandma’s wardrobe. Some of the objects that have fascinated me have a very distant past and an intricate history, as well as a less than Italian origin, another frightening fact. For instance, some time ago the page showed a ‘mysterious Greek clown’, found on a beach in Lecce of which nothing was known except its origins, Greece (thanks to the inscription Kazaplast, a Greek company that produced both toys and bottles of all kinds for third parties). Thanks to the extensive network of Archeoplastica, the mystery has been solved. On the site, its file gives some specifications:
«Amazingly, we have solved the mystery of the Greek clown. It is not even a clown but a Pierrot-style character. It is the little boy Fino who, since the 1950s, has featured in the Attiki company’s honey jars. So this jar contained honey, as confirmed directly by the Greek company who showed us what it originally looked like. This particular jar was produced from 1960 to 1969 and sold only in Greece. As a stopper it had a funnel-shaped cap from which honey came out. We were able to solve the mystery thanks to the intuition of Francesca who follows us on instagram. While researching Greek honey jars, she realised that the design of the Fino character resembled our bottle, both in his facial features and in his gestures. From this trace it was possible to trace a video of the company in which this jar appears. We thank Attiki for their great willingness to provide us with all the information.»
PEZ the candy shooter
Another object that intrigued me quite a bit upon visiting the Archeoplastica site is PEZ the candy shooter. Perhaps those who live in America or who frequent the New World know what I am talking about. But we Europeans, at least those of the new generation, are not familiar with it at all. In fact, it is a company that in Italy only distributed these bottles with mint candies during the 1980s, pointing out that this product – found in Lido di Volano (province of Ferrara) – has been in our seas for over forty years. The story is interesting, as is its design. The website reads:
«1980. PEZ candies were created over 90 years ago. Today they are produced in a factory in Orange, Connecticut, which has been in operation since the early 1970s. Pez candy originated as a breath mint more than 90 years ago in Austria. The name PEZ comes from the German word Pfefferminz, peppermint. It was 1927 and in Vienna, a certain Eduard Haas III was making a fortune with sweets. One fine day, a chemist got him some excellent peppermint and Eduard invented some original sweets. Today PEZ has an infinite number of flavours and is well known in America. When we talk about candy dispensers, Americans know that we are referring to PEZ. In Italy it was on the market probably throughout the 1980s and evidently it was not as successful as it was in America.»
Let’s clean up the beaches and choose sustainable design
On @archeoplastica and its site, there are hundreds of such stories, I would unfortunately say. An endless multitude of plastic products that survive in all conditions for more than a hundred years, altering the marine eco-system and also having a significant impact on our lives. Ecomondo on its website reports a chilling statistic: «Of the seven billion tonnes of plastic waste produced globally to date, less than 10 per cent has been recycled. Which means that millions of tonnes of plastic waste are either lost to the environment or sent thousands of kilometres to destinations where they are mostly burned or dumped». I think in 2024 we all know what microplastics are and their terrible effects, so this summer let’s try to choose a sustainable design for our relaxation (and maybe clean up the beaches a bit).
Courtesy Archeoplastica
