BUDEHAVEN students and the team behind Bude Cleaner Seas Project have spread some love recently, creating a fantastic portrait of Sir David Attenborough using plastic nurdles found on beaches in and around Bude.

In their ongoing collaboration with the Cleaner Seas Project, the Year 7s, guided by Avril Sainsbury of the Cleaner Seas Project, Rachel Miller and colleagues of Budehaven art department, have created a piece of ‘heART’ (their third year of doing so) to highlight the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. The students picked up microplastics from their local beaches and brought the material to school for the project with further donations of micro and macro plastics coming from the beach cleaning community.

There are thousands of pieces of microplastic (plastics smaller than 5mm) and macro (pieces over 5mm) in the art piece. Sir David’s portrait is made up of nurdles (virgin white plastic pellets, the raw material used in making plastic items) and biobeads (small black plastic pellets used in water treatment works to speed up the bacterial process), which are both primary microplastics.

The artwork is part of the school’s ongoing collaboration with the Cleaner Seas Project, and is the third artwork the school has created with the Cleaner Seas Project. The students understand that it’s important to beach clean for the following reasons:

• Every piece picked up is one less piece that can be ingested by marine life.

• It keeps the beaches looking beautiful, and as a community that relies on the tourism industry, this is really important as well as for their own wellbeing as a community.

• Picking up plastic pollution on the beaches makes people mindful about what they buy as consumers — sending a clear message to manufacturers.

• Creating artwork with their beach cleans raises awareness of the plastic pollution issue and helps to stop the plastic tide at source.

The artwork was created to share on Valentine’s Day as part of a global invitation to #ShowYourBeachSomeLove