Lego Lost At Sea: The search for five million figurines lost off the coast of Cornwall in 1997
Date Posted: February 14, 2022
Source: SKY News

Staff Pick: This is one of the news stories our staff is reading this week.

Beachcomber Tracey Williams, from Cornwall, has been documenting her finds for years through her Lego Lost At Sea social media accounts. In a new book, Adrift, she tells the story of how a cargo spill of the toys in 1997 opened her eyes to the problem of plastic in our oceans.

When almost five million pieces of Lego escaped into the sea off the coast of Cornwall, spilled from a cargo ship hit by a freak storm, the tiny, colorful figurines that soon amassed on the beaches quickly became a treasure trove for beachcombers.

Many of the pieces, coincidentally, were sea-themed: flippers, octopuses, life jackets, spear guns, cutlasses, sharks and scuba tanks; thousands of them making their way to the shoreline to be found bobbing in rockpools and strewn across the sand. There were also witches hats, wands, brooms and more.

The Tokio Express was a cargo ship bound for New York in the US after setting sail from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It was 13 February 1997 when it all but overturned about 20 miles off Land's End, the container of Lego one of just 62 that fell into the water. Twenty-five years later, its tiny plastic passengers can still often be found washed up on the shore, many barely unchanged by the passage of time and a life under the waves.

Tracey Williams was living in Devon when the shipping crate spilled, and this is where she first started noticing the Lego. The toys had captured the imaginations of residents for miles around; like the Panini football sticker albums that were playground staples of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, they became collectibles - with the rare green dragons (the container had held just 514, compared with 33,427 black dragons) among the biggest prizes. Black octopuses were the "holy grail" as they blended in with the seaweed so were difficult to spot; Williams found her first in 1997 but didn't discover another for 18 years.

After moving inland, she forgot about the Lego for a while. But after returning to Cornwall in 2010, she discovered Lego items during her very first trip to the beach there. What started as a collecting exercise turned into an exploration of our oceans, the rubbish that ends up in the water, and the lingering legacy of plastic.

Read more.

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