Viva La Cleanup
The Good News Network strikes again. Just when I needed some positive news, they delivered.
The band Coldplay has partnered with the Ocean Cleanup. The band’s next album Moon Music, due in October, will have a limited physical edition made from plastic recovered from the Las Vacas River in Guatemala and other sources.
Coldplay has a history of being eco-friendly. They halted touring in 2019 over concerns of its environmental impact. Their Music of the Spheres tour which started in 2021 has emitted 59% fewer emissions than their 2016–2017 tour by planting 7 million trees, powering 18 shows with a system that uses recycled BWW i3 batteries and diverting 72% of waste from landfills.
The Ocean Cleanup was founded by Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, who was motivated to clean up the world’s oceans after he noticed “more plastic bags than fish” when scuba diving in Greece at age 16. His organization has several Interceptor devices all around the world that do as their name suggests: intercept trash before it leaves rivers and reaches oceans.
As their website states: “Rivers are the main source of ocean plastic pollution. They are the arteries that carry waste from the land to the ocean. According to our research, 1000 rivers are responsible for roughly 80% of riverline pollution.”
Their partnership of Coldplay and the Ocean Cleanup highlights the so-called ‘conscious consumerism’ movement. It’s exactly as it sounds: when you consume, think about the effects of your consumerism. To me, it’s weighing what is used to make a product, what happens when the product is no longer usable and waste byproducts that you may never come into contact with or know about unless you research it.
Growing up in the 90s, I was an avid user and collector of physical media. Newspapers. magazines, books, DVDs, CDs and video games filled my shelves. There wasn’t the alternative of digital media like there is today. I still prefer books and video games physically I can get them, but for the other forms, I’m more than fine to move to digital. Physical media takes many resources to produce and transport. We have to limit our consumption of physical media to reduce trash and pollution. I’d recommend prioritizing 1 or 2 forms that you can’t do without rather than going cold turkey.
People like Boyan Slat are doing even more and that makes me smile. In an era of doomscrolling, I salute the Ocean Cleanup for cleaning up our waterways, Coldplay for pioneering sustainable entertainment and the Good News Network for making me aware of both of them.
There’s great stuff happening if you know where to look!