— By Andru Shively — 

Ridding the seas of plastics might be the white whale of our times, but much less elusive is one made from the stuff itself, as Londoners around Canary Wharf can confirm. Now breaching the waters at Water Street is an 11-metre-tall blue whale constructed from five tonnes of ocean plastics.

New York artist-architects Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang of StudioKCA collected the plastics from Hawaiian beaches in collaboration with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund and built the sculpture to highlight the sheer scale of plastics pollution at sea.

The largest animal ever to exist makes for striking subject matter, too, as there are reportedly now more plastics (around 150 mn t) in the ocean by weight than all blue whales combined. Let that sink in.

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The installation also underlines the reimagination of waste as a valuable resource. In addition to the reuse of plastic litter, the concrete mixture of the sculpture’s base includes material derived from spent coffee grounds from area restaurants.

The Whale on the Wharf joins a pod of whales of waste from StuidoKCA that previously came up for air in Bruges, Belgium, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Unlike the behemoth that tormented Captain Ahab, these whales are begging to be captured.