The Non Valley in Italy’s far north is approximately 1000km from the city of Brindisi, in the ‘heel of the boot. It’s a long, long way – virtually the whole country rests in between – but Enzo Suma has found a plastic sign that travelled the whole distance, by water.
The sign used to hang near the Noce river. Then it fell, probably because of the rain. It travelled among the mountains, floating on the waterway that at some point merges with the Adige river. From here, it flowed into the sea until it reached the region of Puglia, where Brindisi is located.
When Suma picked it up, he could hardly believe it: “It covered huge distances, probably more than 1000 km because he must have zigzagged. It’s not recent, so I guess it must have been stuck somewhere. Still this finding should make us think a little more: a piece of plastic that ends up in the water so far away can reach distant beaches, worsening the pollution. Therefore, we must protect the sea also from the mountains”.
Suma is the founder of the Archeoplastica project, a word that combines “archaeology” and “plastic”. He collects rubbish he finds on Italy’s shores, especially in Puglia, where he lives.
Some of the objects are from as far back as the ‘60s, the ‘70s, the ‘80s and so on. Others are a little more recent, from ‘90s or the ‘00s. But the point is that they are still there, and they have remained almost intact over time because they are made of plastic.
Suma puts them in a sort of virtual museum, and he keeps them to show in a travelling exhibit. The aim, he explains, is to use these leftovers to tell the story of plastic pollution, one of the most visinble examples of human impact on the environment.
It all started in 2018, when Suma saw an empty bottle of self-tanner on the beach. After some research, he found out that it was almost 50 years old. From that moment on, he started to collect more and more pieces. When he reached 200 items that were interesting enough, he officially launched the project.
That was in 2021. “I can’t say how many remnants we’ve found since then, but it’s a large number,” he says. “People embraced our goal and began to help us by collecting leftovers in other regions of Italy as well. The objects we put on our website and on social networks are the oldest ones (but) of course, they’re just a part of the huge amount of plastic we usually find”. The contemporary rubbish goes for recycling.
“We want to show the paradox of single-use plastic: a material that is supposed to be used very quickly, just once, and that will probably last for decades”, says Suma. He and the people who help him with the project have developed several skills to date the rubbish they find on the beach: “For example, we look at some crustaceans that usually stick to floating objects. If they are wide (about two centimetres), it means they have been on that object for a long time, like a month or two. We therefore assume that piece of plastic has been in the sea for – at least – the same amount of time.
“Here in Puglia, the ones with larger crustaceans come from Croatia. But everything goes round the Mediterranean”.
Apart from his knowledge of marine life, Suma always checks the design of his finds. “The ones from the ‘80s don’t have sticky labels,” he says. “The graphic is printed directly on the plastic itself, and it’s usually visible. The ones from the ‘60s and ‘70s have information about the product embossed on them. Then we check for any reference to laws introduced over the time, such as those relating to trade”.
Suma finds all kinds of leftovers. Especially empty packages of sun cream, detergents, fabric softeners, ice cream boxes, plastic bags and so on. But recently, he says, he also came across an old mobile phone, dated around 2006, with the SIM card still in it. And some toys in the shape of cats, hidden in cheese snacks as a surprise, very popular from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. And a ball with the Italia ’90 logo, marking the year in which Italy hosted the World Cup.
Winter is the ‘best’ time of year to find plastic pollution in the sea, he says. This happens because of the weather, bringing coastal storms and rain, and also because the beach resorts are closed. “And there’s no cleaning, not even by the municipalities,” Suma explains. Moreover, the Adriatic is more exposed to pollution because of its currents.
The best of Suma’s finds are on the Archeoplastica virtual museum, where finds can be seen in 3D. “It helps us to spread our message, like our visits to schools,” he says. “The nostalgic aspect of our project is just a hook: our followers start to identify with the objects we find on the beach because they remind them of their childhood or youth. But then they see the problem: if this stuff is still there, almost intact, after all these years, that means we have to do something”.
Most popular
Boris Johnson is finished – so of course he’ll be back as Tory leader
The plot to fool America
John Locke and the price of genius
The hidden war crime
