The Sea
Half of the oxygen produced
on Earth is made in the sea,
by organisms too small to see.
One of them — Prochlorococcus, the smallest photosynthetic organism there is — accounts for up to a fifth of the oxygen in the biosphere. It was only discovered in 1986.
SOURCE: NOAA OCEAN SERVICE — “HOW MUCH OXYGEN COMES FROM THE OCEAN?”
The sea did not lend us the air. It built it.
The sea also uses almost all that oxygen again: everything in it breathes, and everything that dies in it decomposes. So the air above us is not a stock being handed over year by year.
It is what was left over. Each time dead matter sank and was buried in the seabed instead of rotting, the oxygen that would have broken it down stayed in the sky. Our atmosphere is hundreds of millions of years of that remainder, made by things we cannot see, in water we treat as somewhere to put things.
892
items of litter counted per 100 metres of Italian beach, Legambiente Beach Litter survey, 2025
77.9%
of it plastic
~20%
of the oxygen in the biosphere produced by a single bacterium
THE GREEN CANVAS
10% of what I receive from every
print sale goes to people who are
already in the water.
My work is about what people have decided not to look at. So the money goes to the ones who do the looking — who walk the beach, count what is on it, and publish the number.
From October 2026, on every print, editions included. The total goes up on this page once a year.
WHERE IT GOES
Three organisations, three coasts
ITALY
Legambiente
Runs Spiagge e Fondali Puliti, the national beach and seabed clean-up, and publishes the Beach Litter survey that goes with it — so the rubbish is counted, not only removed.
FRANCE · EUROPE
Surfrider Foundation Europe
An ocean conservation NGO based in Biarritz. Its Ocean Initiatives put volunteer clean-ups on coasts, rivers and lakes across Europe every year.
SPAIN
Fundación Ecoalf — Upcycling the Oceans
Fishermen bring back the plastic they pull up in their nets instead of throwing it over the side. It is sorted on land and turned into yarn.