A plastic ‘Thunderbirds’ figurine from a 1960s cereal pack has washed up on a beach in Newquay, Cornwall, still perfectly intact.
Emily Stevenson found the replica Jeff Tracey, from the long-running puppet TV series, on the sand at Watergate Bay during a sweep for plastic litter.
“I went back to Watergate Bay to assess the plastics, and lying there was this! It’s a 1966 Kellogg’s Cereal mini-figure of Thunderbirds’ Jeff Tracey,” said Stevenson, who is co-founder of the environmental campaign, Beach Guardian.
“This little green man has probably been in the ocean for over 50 years.”
Just a short distance away at Mawgan Porth, another beach, local Kerry Skinner stumbled across the preserved head of a plastic Hippo. Kerry said she thinks the Hippo head may be a resin cast.
It isn’t the first time unlikely pieces of plastic have been found on British beaches. In October, a 47-year-old Fairy Liquid bottle washed up on to Brean Beach in Burnham, Somerset during a storm in almost perfect condition.
The coastguard team also found shoes and other plastics on the shore.
“If you watched the BBC One program ‘Drowning In Plastic’ you will see what effects plastics are having on our entire world. What can we do about this modern day scourge? We can try and reduce our day to day plastic use, which is difficult with current manufacturing,” they said in a Facebook post at the time.