35. Hard hat, shotgun cartridges and lobster tags
Dr Tom Stanton
Human activities are placing innumerable pressures on environmental systems. Pollution is just one of the ways people are compromising environmental health. But pollution is as much a societal issue as an environmental one. Plastic pollution has raised the profile of society’s environmental footprint, and piqued public, corporate, and governmental attention, more than any other pollutant.
My research aims to better understand the sources, pathways, and distribution of all pollution, particularly in aquatic environments. The pieces of litter on display have been recovered from the Isle of Skye, in Scotland, and each tell a story.
The first local on Skye that I spoke to about marine litter told me a story of growing up having competitions to find coconuts on the beach, and how they now compete to find hard hats as well. This hard hat was retrieved from the first beach my team surveyed on Skye.
Shotgun casings have been recovered from every Skye beach my team have surveyed. Local legend tells a story of shotgun casings washed ashore on Orkney once being traced, from their serial numbers, to North America. After the local, and then UK national police were alerted to a potential illegal arms trade, North American law enforcement was contacted who tracked down the store that sold the shells found on Orkney beaches. Here the shop owner revealed that shooting of seabirds and seals off Canada’s east coast was the likely source of these shotgun shells.
Lobster tags also have numbers and letters on them. Loughborough PhD researcher Isobel Evans – at the time a Loughborough Undergraduate – managed to decode these letters and numbers to work out where these tags come from. The blue tag on display came from Newfoundland, Canada (NL) and was issued in 2005. The red tag on display came from Maine, USA (ME) and was issued in 2007. We have found tags spanning Newfoundland to Florida, dating back to 1989.
This work was all inspired by a 1972 publication recording marine litter on the Isle of Skye. The story of our first field trip is told in this short documentary, filmed and produced by Loughborough University’s media team, and scored by local musician Josh Wheatley.
Find out more about Tom’s research here.
