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Philomène, Solène and Anaëlle set up the Azur Project. By kayak and swimming, they travel along the Mediterranean to raise awareness of the pollution that follows the water cycle. Brut met them.
“We’ve been sailing from Italy to Spain for a month now, from pizza to paella, all contaminated with plastic of course. For example, 56% of Mediterranean anchovies are contaminated with plastic, the same ones that we find in our pizzas and we don’t like that because nobody likes plastic pizzas.“Anaëlle Marot, Philomène le Lay and Solène Chevreuil are three adventurers who together created the Azur Project. Their goal: to raise awareness of the pollution of the water cycle. “Water from the mountains descends through torrents, rivers, into rivers, flows into the sea and returns to the mountains by evaporation. And so all the pollution that is found in this cycle also circulates, so we must not believe that pollution that takes place in one place will not be found elsewhere.”, explains Solène Chevreuil.
“In fact, at sea, we see the finality of the water cycle, we see how hydrocarbons, plastic and a lot of pollution in the Mediterranean will evaporate and return to the water cycle. And it’s all contaminated by our actions as human beings”, explains Philomène le Lay. “There, we see a beach that looks healthy and if we zoom in, we start to see small pieces. All of that is plastic, which is found in just about everything. It is found in the rain, in our fish, in our plants, in our skin, in our placenta and so on.”
Through their approach, they want to draw the attention of as many people as possible to this problem. “Raising individual awareness is what we know how to do best, but I think we really need to go on a larger scale. In agriculture, we have the overconsumption of water to feed our livestock, we have the overconsumption of water in the textile industry to create T-shirts (…). And we also pollute our lakes, our rivers enormously by industry in general”, adds Philomene le Lay.