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This huge whale is made of recycled plastic 🐳🌊

By Kristen Stephenson
Published

A whale-ly cool record! 🐳

This huge whale sculpture was made by Monterey Bay Aquarium in California (USA) to highlight the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. 🌊

Visitors could find a massive whale made up of recycled materials - a structure that is now officially the world's largest recycled plastic sculpture (supported).   

The huugeeee blue whale measured 25.89 m (84 ft 11.6 in) long, 8.07 m (26 ft 5.8 in) wide and 4.2 m (13 ft 9.6 in) high. 🐳📏

It's made up of plastic bottles, re-used toys, and even milk jugs – showing the dangers of plastic pollution to sea creatures. All of these were collected from the Monterey Bay area.


"Every nine minutes 300,000 lb of plastic – the weight of a blue whale – makes its way into the ocean" said the Monterey-based aquarium.

Local artists  Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova wanted to make the sculpture as life-like as possible, so they made sure that the whale was the right size. 

They even went as far as sorting the trash themselves before starting the structure.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium hopes to get people to avoid using plastic materials that could harm ocean life.

Over in Cyprus, a 17-year-old created a huge drawing of a turtle surrounded by plastic. 🐢

Alex Dzaghigian drew a turtle eating a plastic bag because they confuse them for jellyfish.