All over Midway Island birds are dying from eating the plastic that floats in the surrounding seas. Midway, as its name suggests, is halfway across the Pacific, as far as any place could be from any continent. But you can’t avoid plastic. 6.4 million tons of it is dumped in the sea every year. Everything you have ever thrown away is still with us, and will be for 450 years. So the birds will decay away to nothing, but their plastic memorial cairn will be there for half a millennium.

See more photos by Chris Jordan of bird carcasses with stomachs full of plastic on the Beautiful Decay website .

His own website (chrisjordan.com) gently chastens our appetite for petrochemicals. Chris has recreated the well-known masterpiece, ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Botticelli pictured below, from 240k plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of plastic bags consumed around the world every ten seconds.

(Thanks to Brighton Science Festival for this information.)

Of 70k bags given out each year, 13k bags have been saved since January by Bright News of Buckingham Road Brighton, which got ahead of the law introduced this October for single use bags to be charged at 5p by supermarkets.