She is an exceptional athlete, a specialist in the leap of the angel, not from classic diving boards but from cliffs, rocks tens of meters high. At 26, Eleanor “Ellie” Smart will participate in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Boston, USA on Saturday, and she took advantage of the event to give a long interview to CNN and talk about what really worries her: the plastic. All forms of plastic pollution, bottles, bags, cigarette butts, cups, or even fishing nets on which it falls more and more with each cliff jump.
Meet Eleanor Smart, the cliff diver with a mightier mission than just winning at her sport. Her workplace includes stunning locales, but under the surface, Smart’s been shocked by the extent of pollution in many locations, so she’s on a mission to clean up the world’s beaches pic.twitter.com/Y9MWxguebz
— CNN (@CNN) June 2, 2022
Four years ago in Greece, she found herself with a plastic bag wrapped around her ankles when entering the water, a bag that hindered her ascent to the surface. “I came out of the water and it hit meshe tells CNN, because I knew there was a problem with plastic pollution but had never experienced it. If you don’t see things for yourself, it can be very hard to get involved, and worry..”
And Ellie Smart is worried. When the journalist asks her if she isn’t sometimes afraid of jumping in the middle of the rocks, she replies that what scares her is rather the 20 million tonnes of waste dumped into the oceans every year. state of the seabed, and the omnipresence of this waste wherever it goes, from Croatia to Turkey via Costa Rica or Bali.
To react, she first started by cleaning herself, after each jump, to make collections. And then, she created her association Clean Cliffs project, (clean cliffs), which organizes collections on the beaches, but also awareness workshops, to give the keys to the problem to those who want to understand, explain in particular the cycle of pollution, from buying in the trash, to the river, to the sea, to fish, to our plate.
“OYou can’t do anything if you don’t know. Por our first beach cleanups, we received a lot of criticism saying ‘it’s useless, the litter always comes back’, and yes, it’s true, it does come back, but in these actions, we highlight the plastic, we show it, we encourage it to look. ” An approach that for her “makes you aware” and then to act.