SOUTH PADRE ISLAND — Imagine seeing a big, beautiful sea turtle with blue bottle cap eyes and a fish with toothbrush fins.
A local nonprofit organization is saving the ocean one sculpture at a time.
With about 10 volunteers, the group called Washed Up has been collecting plastic trash from local beaches and transforming it into large sculptures of sea and wildlife creatures.
These volunteers notably call their sculptures “Mascots for the Sea” because they believe they are visual representations of what people are doing wrong with their trash.
Last November, Connie Lovell, a Harlingen resident and interior designer, came up with the idea of this organization after a trip to the beach.
“I was on my way home from the beach complaining about how trashy it was and I asked myself, ‘Well, what have you done and what are you going to do about it,’” said Lovell, president of Washed Up.
Soon after, she began researching what other people were doing and was inspired by a similar organization in Oregon that designs and creates large sea sculptures from trash removed from beaches.
“That I can do and I will love doing it,” Lovell said after seeing the sculptures Washed Ashore has created.
“If I could create 24/7, I’m the happiest person in the world,” Lovell added.
She visited Washed Ashore in Oregon and learned how to create a long-lasting infrastructure of the sculptures.
“It saved me 10 years of someone calling and saying, ‘The tail just fell off of the fish,’” Lovell said.
Plastic debris on the beach and in the ocean has a noticeably negative effect on our local sea turtles.
“Sea turtles do ingest plastic in various forms. We see numerous turtles every year, but we do see plastics in about 50 percent of our turtles, specifically our younger turtles,” said Jeff George, Sea Turtle Inc. executive director.
One of Washed Up’s long-range goals is to have its art sculptures in a destination exhibit for South Padre Island visitors.
Josie, the sea turtle sculpture, was made with about 20 flip flops and will be placed on display on South Padre Island within a month.
“Putting this turtle on display serves to remind all of our visitors that we are individually responsible,” George said.
Metal will rust, wood will rot and glass will break, but plastic never goes away, said Julie Harrington, a volunteer of Washed Up.
“Our Mascots of the Sea are a really soft way to introduce people to the problem,” Lovell said. “They let you come to your own conclusion about that and when you come to that conclusion, I think that’s better than me telling you.”
What’s next on their list of sea sculptures? Washed Up is going to create a pair of dolphins that they’re hoping to have finished by next fall.
Washed Up is planning on taking their dolphin sculpture, finished or unfinished, to the upcoming Adopt-A-Beach cleanup on South Padre Island, so people can see the structure and learn how it’s made.
• Have a location on South Padre Island where the public can come to learn about plastic pollution.
• Have classes for children to teach them about the problem using the plastic trash as art.
• Have a location where volunteers can come to clean trash and help create art sculptures.
• Have a drop off site for trash collected on the beach.
• Have a lab where Washed Up can support the development of a solution to the plastic pollution crisis.
• Sell “Mascots for the Sea” to sustain the programs and provide a financial return to its business partner, the City of South Padre Island.
