Laura Wells recalls how she felt when she first noticed the destruction that human beings had wrought on nature.
She was in Little Curaçao, a small island in the Caribbean, for a modelling job. One side of the island was beautiful, while the other was covered in plastic pollution. “I was just completely dumbfounded,” Laura recalls. “You can’t even walk on the sand… Some of [the plastic] is so old that you can pick it up and it completely degrades in your hands – it is just so perished by the sun and by wind and waves.”
In places like Hawaii, South Africa and other parts of the Caribbean, Laura says assistants would rake pollution off the beach so they could start the shoot. “It was a really big eye-opener… I was noticing it absolutely everywhere, even down to small pieces of microplastics.”
She realised that she could make a difference and help to tackle these issues herself – moving home to Australia to educate people about the environment. “It just made me go, ‘Well, I’ve got a voice,
