In January 1992 a container filled with 7,200 yellow ducks and the same number each of blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, blow-moulded out of plastic for American children at bathtime, broke loose in a storm on the deck of a container ship on its way from China and fell into the Pacific somewhere south of the Aleutian Islands.
The container ruptured, the boxes soaked away and 11 months later the Floatees — the name was embossed on each — began to be noticed washing up among the bottle caps and Japanese fishing floats on the shores of the Gulf of Alaska, sparking a flutter of news stories. The stories were still going 11 years later when a single yellow floaty duck made by the same Massachusetts company was sighted on the coast of Maine.
A barnacle-encrusted toy found on the coast of Devon also made headlines, but probably wasn’t the right kind of duck.
Whatever gave this story such an extended news lifetime evidently captured the imagination of Donovan Hohn, a former English teacher, now Features Editor of American GQ. The upshot is this archly titled book. Hohn sets out to explain how the ducks came to be shipwrecked, and where they were carried on the ocean currents, by setting out in pursuit. His quest has an Ahab-like folly about it because, after journeying for thousands of miles, he finds no toys anywhere, other than those washed up on Alaskan coasts already deep in thousands of tons of litter. He crosses the North West Passage without meeting a single plastic beaver.
As he travels around the Pacific, Hohn writes what is nearly a very good book about the plague of plastics pollution. This, he admits, is scarcely one of the world’s greatest problems, but it is one we still haven’t the foggiest how to solve.
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