In June 2019 we were totally thrilled to be able to launch ‘Nelson’, the Final Fat Fish! Nelson, or Nellie as she is affectionately called, is a huge metal fish that we can transport around the area, visiting festivals, parks and towns with an aim to raise awareness of the sheer volume of disposable plastic bottles we use. The idea is simple – the public fill Nellie up with their used plastic bottles and aluminium cans, illustrating just how many of these disposable items we use and the huge volume of waste we create.
In the UK alone it is estimated that we use up to 13 BILLION single-use plastic bottles every year, and only just over half of these are recycled*. We see so many plastic bottles discarded on roadsides, in towns and in the countryside. We pick them up on every single beach clean. They are everywhere, making their way into our precious ecosystems and endangering wildlife, as well as looking unsightly.
Nellie the Final Fat Fish aims to highlight this as a beautiful metal sculpture bin. It is a whopping 6 metres long and made entirely from scrap metal – wheel arches, old boat trailers, the frames from old warehouse trolleys and old chicken wire. The fabulous team at Sailboat Trailers in Emsworth created Nelson for us and we are thrilled with the result!
If you would like Nellie to come to an event that you are organising or that is happening near you (in the Solent area), please feel free to drop us an email and we will see if we can make it happen!
A huge thanks go out to the Portsmouth City Council High Street Community Clean Up Fund and the FatFace Foundation for helping to fund this project.
* House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, Plastic bottles: Turning Back the Plastic Tide. First Report of Session 2017–19
