When we set up this campaign, our main idea was to demonstrate that marine litter can really travel long distances, and even if it is out of your sight, it should not be out of your mind. We tried to select such locations as the starting points of these simulations, which would enable a long journey for our virtual litter. However, we had to admit that no matter how well we planned this, it was the elements that decided, where the litter would end up. Now, as we have reached the third update of our Bergen case, we have had to give a little push to our plastic bottle in order to keep the story flowing.

In end of January, our plastic bottle had ended up in a long, narrow fjord, and it seemed that it was kind of stuck there. We ran a new simulation for our next period, 3.2.-3.3.2022, and the bottle did not manage to get out of that fjord. But show must go on, and that’s why we are introducing you to “Bjørn”. Bjørn is a local guy, who is living in the municipality of Åfjord, where the bottle ended up last time. Bjørn is single, he enjoys long walks on the beach and cares a lot about the environment. In one of his morning strolls by the beach he came across our plastic bottle and picked it up. Since the bottle was still in good shape, he was going to take it to the bottle return machine at the local supermarket. Bjørn would have gotten a few "krones" in return for his efforts and the bottle would have started a new journey that would have ended in a plastic recycling facility. But destiny decided differently. Bjørn is also a keen fisherman and has a boat in a local marina, and this is where the journey of the bottle took a sudden turn. As he was heading to his boat later that day, Bjørn unloaded his gear from the trunk of the car and our bottle fell out and was immediately swept to the sea by a strong wind. He did not have his landing net at hand, so he could not fish the bottle out of the sea. And that’s how the journey of our virtual bottle got a reboot…

For the first two weeks, after getting out of its trap, the bottle was drifting slowly along the shore, occasionally coming to land. Then it was pulled to open sea and got speed under its wings. It has speeded up towards north and has ended up in north, in the county of Nordland, close to 66 degrees north to be exact. The advance has been pretty straight forward, as the bottle is now about 250 km away from where it started 4 weeks ago, but the total distance that it has covered during this period is only slightly longer, just under 300 km. The bottle is again hugging the shore, and there is the possibility, that it will be lured into a another nice, deep fjord. The fjord leading to Mosjøen is close, and the longer one leading into Mo i Rana is not that far either… We’ll find out what happens to the bottle in 4 weeks, and on next week we will get an update to the whereabouts of our Scottish ghost net.