Why Garfield phones keep washing up on French shores

Apr 01, 2019

By Herb Scribner

No one knows why plastic Garfield phones washed up on the French coast for the last 30 years… until now.

AFP reports that the mysterious Garfield landline phones were washing up on the French shores since the 1980s, raising questions among local communities. But a local resident revealed why the phones were washing ashore just this week.

Rene Morvan and his brother were reportedly walking on the beach during a storm 20 years ago when they found the phones spread across the coast, FranceInfo reported. They returned to the beach during low tide and walked across nearby cliffs. That’s where they found the source of the phones.

“We found a container that was stranded in a fault, it was open, a lot of things were gone but there was a stock of phones,” Morvan said.

He said he didn’t share his knowledge at the time because “there was a lot of things that came to us from the sea.”

Claire Simonin-Le Meur, the head of beach cleaning group Ar Viltansou, told AFP that they always find the phones when they go out to clean beaches. Simonin said the group has collected more than 200 plastic pieces and wires over the last 30 years.

Next steps: Fabien Boileau, the director of the Ironise Marine Nature Park, said that the group will continue to clean the area, according to Fox News.

“We will still go there to recover the remains of phones. It will always be less plastic and electronics in the sea. But I have little hope that we will be very effective.”

Simonin-Le Mur said finding the container could help solve the problem, The Washington Post reported.

“Our preoccupation was to understand why we had so many Garfields everywhere. We thought it would be helpful to find the container so we can stop it. But that was unfortunately not the case,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “What we found was the remainder of the shipping container. And it was empty.”

She added that so far, it’s not different. “We found plastic last Friday and Saturday and Sunday, and we have found a lot of pieces of Garfield,” she said. “Things are just exactly the same.”