“Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach”

title and refrain of the second song from the 2010 concept album Plastic Beach by the British virtual band Gorillaz. Damon Albarn, who writes the songs, was moved to explore themes of disposable commodities when he noticed all the plastic mixed with the sand near his beach house. That was four years after Pam Longobardi, an Atlanta-based artist and professor of art at Georgia State University, had encountered “mountainous piles of plastic the ocean regurgitated on remote Hawaiian beaches.” Longobardi describes herself as a conceptual artist focused on exploring “the cultural archaeology of our time.” This month’s cover image, Ghosts of Consumption/Archaeology of Culture (for Piet M.), is one of the most recognized works in her award-winning, ongoing Drifter’s Project. It documents the impact of plastic marine debris as it journeys around the world’s oceans, coalescing inside giant oceanic currents known as gyres and concentrating the plastic into areas such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that floats north of Hawaii. Hundreds of plastic objects—taken from the tens of thousands of pounds of plastic debris Longobardi has removed