Ad of the Day: Laser beam shark helmets among kids’ solutions to plastic pollution
To honor the United Nation’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, TBWA\Chiat\Day\LA has collaborated with Conservation International on an inspiring film tackling one of the biggest topics of recent times – plastic in our oceans. ‘Doing Nothing is Crazier’ features a group of young and optimistic kids who all pitch in with their ideas on how to solve the issue and protect something that we all rely on.
'Doing Nothing is Crazier' by TBWA\Chiat\Day\LA and Conservation International
The film, created in partnership with SC Johnson, begins with the somber tones of a piano and birds chirping in the distance on a quiet beach, which at an initial glance looks fairly idyllic, but the camera soon pans on to a plastic water bottle bobbing along the waves.
The overarching theme of the ad is how would a child’s imagination address this crisis?
The ideas put forward in the spot include turning the act of getting rid of plastic on the beach into a game, planting palm trees to collect coconuts shells to use as alternative storage solutions and, most imaginatively, putting laser beam helmets on to sharks to incinerate all the debris.
As amusing as the ideas are, it’s important that we educate children and each other about the scale of this issue, and remember that it is better to do something than nothing at all.
According to Conservation International, we dump 8m metric tons of plastic into our waters each year, which is the equivalent of nearly 57,000 blue whales, and takes roughly 400 years to eventually degrade.
Its website states: “There’s so much junk floating in the sea, the debris has formed giant garbage patches. There are five of them around the world, and the largest – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – includes an estimated 1.8tn pieces of trash. That’s an area twice the size of Texas.”
Conservation International is encouraging everyone to watch the film and take a pledge to help keep our oceans clean.
The UN’s Climate Change Conference 2020 recently took place in Glasgow, Scotland. You can read The Drum’s coverage of Cop26 here.
