Haven't signed into your Scholastic account before?
Teachers, not yet a subscriber?
Subscribers receive access to the website and print magazine.
You are being redirecting to Scholastic's authentication page...
Announcements & Tutorials
Renew Now, Pay Later
Sharing Google Activities
2 min.
Setting Up Student View
Exploring Your Issue
Using Text to Speech
Join Our Facebook Group!
1 min.
Subscriber Only Resources
Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to Science World magazine.
Article Options
Presentation View
Phone Mystery
FRED TANNEAU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
TELEPHONE TRASH: A plastic Garfield phone on a beach in France
JIM MCMAHON/MAPMAN®
For decades, people along France’s northwest coast have pondered a mystery: Why do plastic phones shaped like the cartoon cat Garfield keep washing up on local beaches? Recently, an environmental group cracked the case. They located a shipping container in a cave. It had been swept off a cargo ship in the 1980s, and has been dribbling phones into the sea ever since.
Plastic objects, like the phones, don’t break down easily. So they can stick around as pollution for a long time. “This is an example of why plastics can be bad for the environment,” says Matthew Savoca, an ecologist at Stanford University in California.
SOURCE: WORLD SHIPPING COUNCIL
Containers being carried by cargo ships can fall overboard during a storm or end up in the ocean if a ship sinks. Examine the graph. Are there any outlying data points on the graph? If so, what might have caused the difference compared with other years?
RELATED CONTENT