Face masks have become the must-wear accessory of 2020. But they then get discarded and end up littering the landscape. Now a Franco-British duo is walking over 750 kilometres from Marseille to Paris, removing thousands of masks from roads and fields.
One is nicknamed the “English snail’ and the other the ‘Marseille boar.’ Together, Edmund Platt and Frédéric Munsch are taking on the immense perambulation, collecting facemasks as well as plastic bottles and fast food waste.
They call their mission ‘Déchet par jour’ – or one piece of rubbish a day – and the intention is to protect the environment and to encourage others to be less careless.
“It’s unbearable the masks on the floor, the cigarette butts on the floor, the McDonald’s on the floor, the cans, the bottles… We’re in front of a school,” says Platt, clearly appalled.
A symbol of the times?
They say they can tell when they are getting nearer a city by the build-up of discarded masks:
“Every time you pick up one piece of rubbish, it is as if you give a hug and you get a little stroke of happiness to the planet.”
The duo are expected to arrive in Paris on Saturday..
Watch Euronews’s full report in the player above.
