850 km from London to Paris: Insights into the expedition of Plastic Soup Surfer Merijn Tinga

A hole in the board, strong currents, huge container ships, lack of wind and uncomfortable nights on the beach - in this video, Merijn Tinga provides exciting insights into the daily life of an expedition surfer travelling.

• You can read more about Tinga's expedition and its background here.

This was Tinga's tenth long-distance surfing expedition. The surfing activist wants France to introduce deposit systems for plastic bottles as soon as possible. He will once again be surfing on a windsurfing board made partly from plastic bottles that he has collected from the Seine in Paris. Last summer, he surfed from Oslo to London to symbolically return plastic bottles that had drifted across the North Sea from the UK to Norway.

• Interview with Merijn Tinga: Activism on a surfboard, 1800 kilometres across the sea from Oslo to London

During his sailing and surfing trips, Tinga has seen a lot of rubbish from the UK, but also from France. For example, he found plastic bottles from England and the Netherlands on the Swedish and Norwegian coasts due to the ocean currents. Deposit systems have been in place in the Scandinavian countries for years, but they are still contaminated with waste from other countries. Just like in England, deposit systems have also been under discussion in France for years. Tinga: "I want to use my trip to speed up the introduction of deposit systems in France. Plastic waste from France ends up on our North Sea coasts. With this expedition, I want to symbolically bring these French plastic bottles back to the source."