Greenpeace installs whale sculpture from plastic waste on Philippine beach

Greenpeace has constructed a massive whale sculpture on Naic beach, south of Manila, using thousands of plastic waste items to protest ocean pollution. The installation depicts a beached whale suffocating by disposable bottles, highlighting the Philippines' status as the third most polluted coastline globally after China and Indonesia, where over 20% of the country's waste ends up in the sea. The sculpture will remain on the beach until next Sunday. This is not Greenpeace's first use of art for environmental advocacy. In 2015, the organization launched 'La Casa dei Pesci' (The House of Fish) in Talamone, Italy, the first underwater art park, featuring marble blocks sculpted by artists Emily Young, Giorgio Butini, and Massimo Catalani to deter illegal trawling. The most notable art-backed campaign was against Arctic drilling, where the British duo kennardphillipps created the video 'A Song of Oil, Ice and Fire,' showing replicas of three famous contemporary artworks—David Hockney's 'Pearblossom Highway,' Andrew Wyeth's 'Christina's World,' and William Bradford's 'An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay'—being set ablaze to symbolize the destruction of the pristine Arctic by oil corporations.