The 35-year mystery behind vintage orange Garfield phone pieces washing up on France’s beaches has been somewhat solved, reports the BBC.
An anti-litter group called Ar Vilantsou this week discovered a destroyed metal shipping container inside a cave tucked into the seaside cliffs close to the beach in Plouarzel, western France, containing Garfield phone parts. A farmer who lived in the area notified the group of the location.
"You had to really know the area well," Rene Morvan told Franceinfo. "We found a container aground in a fissure. It was open. Many of the things were gone, but there was a stock of phones," he recalled.
Morvan said he noticed the Garfield telephones after a storm blew through the area in the mid-1980s.
The shipping container was empty, though, so finding the container wasn’t helpful.
“Our preoccupation was to understand why we had so many Garfields everywhere. We thought it would be helpful to find the container so we can stop it. But that was unfortunately not the case,” Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told The Washington Post. “What we found was the remainder of the shipping container. And it was empty.”
In 2018, approximately 200 pieces of Garfield phone parts were harvested in the area, leading to the phone’s pieces being added to the Ansel association’s list of recurring waste on its Ocean Plastic Tracker.