In the North Pacific there is so much plastic an area of trash the size of France has formed. Governments have simply ignored it. So we found a way to ensure they couldn’t. By turning the country sized trash patch into an official country. On World Oceans Day, 8th June 2017, The Plastic Oceans Foundation and LadBible submitted an application to The United Nations to recognise The Trash Isles as an official country. Because if it is recognised as an official country, then other countries are obliged to help clean it up. We created an identity for the country and asked the public to support it by becoming citizens.

The Plastic Oceans Foundation is a global non-profit organisation that addresses the issue of plastic pollution and how it impacts our waters and sea life so they were perfect to bring attention to the amount of plastic clogging up our oceans.

As we were trying to convince The United Nations to approve our application to recognise The Trash Isles as an official country we needed to not only talk like a country, but walk like one too.

We created everything an official country needs.

A flag which demonstrated the fact that there was an island of plastic floating in our ocean.

We created a currency called Debris. The illustrations on the notes demonstrate the horrible reality of how the plastic is affecting our oceans.

The passport also carried on the theme of animal brutality with other sea life including a seal and a turtle trapped by the plastic floating in the ocean.

The postage stamps also showed the sheer volume of trash in the ocean and how its devastated the surrounding sea life.

All these assets were printed on recycled plastic to re-use the very thing that was hurting the oceans.

The design assets namely the flag, currency, passport and stamps added a lot to the project. It helped to make something that sits hundreds of miles out at sea more tangible to the public by showing the excruciating horror of the plastic problem.

The design materials were part of a campaign that achieved over 200,000 signatures on our petition, reached over half a billion people. It was talked about on international news channels and written about in hundreds of blogs around the world praising it for its design and visual impact.

Situation

8 million tons of plastic is dumped in our ocean each year. Despite the scale of this problem and the massive areas this plastic is now forming Governments have simply ignored it and the public are unaware of it.

Brief

Draw the attention to the unacceptable amounts of plastic in the ocean and make governments take notice

Objectives

Make the public aware of the scale of the problem.

Get the press and public talking about the issue.

Get The United Nations to take notice of the campaign.

Project scale and volume

As this was a PR led idea only an exclusive number of flags, money, passports and stamps needed to be produced. They were given to big name celebrities, shared with press and media and for photographed / shoot for campaign assets.