What the Ocean Sends Back

The Lion King told me about the circle of life when I was seven, and I filed it away as something that applied to wildebeests and philosophy majors. It did not occur to me that it would eventually describe the trajectory of a discarded plastic bag from a supermarket checkout to someone’s nightstand drawer.

Brazilian ad agency Africa, in partnership with MTV, came up with the idea of collecting the mountains of plastic waste choking the world’s oceans—rogue Barbie limbs, orphaned phone cases, half-crushed bottles, forgotten yoga mats—and manufacturing them into brightly colored sex toys. The environmental problem is real: there is a catastrophic amount of plastic floating in places it shouldn’t be, entire artificial islands forming in the Pacific. The proposed solution, however, is a dildo.

There’s something both admirable and deeply strange about the whole enterprise. I can think of no cleaner rebuke to consumerism than turning its garbage into something you fuck. The plastic you tossed carelessly returns transformed, lurid, weirdly cheerful, ready to get back inside you in a completely different context. Sure, it’s a bit odd to think about the full biographical arc of whatever you’re holding—retired Happy Meal toy, former Nokia back panel, three years in the North Atlantic—but as a concept it has an internal logic that’s hard to argue with. The least you can do for the ocean is let it reciprocate.