kenyatta:

A French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades.

Since the 1980s, the Iroise coast in Brittany has received a supply of bright orange landline novelty phones shaped like the famous cartoon cat.

Anti-litter campaigners have been collecting fragments of the feline for years as they clean the beaches.

But now, the source of the problem has been found - a lost shipping container.

Last year, campaigners from the Ar Vilantsou anti-litter group made the novelty phone a symbol of the plastic pollution on the beaches of the Finistère region - part of which is a designated marine park.

The media attention on the new campaign, however, drew the eye of a local farmer who remembered the first téléphone Garfield appearing after a storm in the early 1980s, when he was a young man. He also knew the location of the container - in a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide.

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Inside the rock fissure, they found orange plastic poking out from beneath the rocks. The container appeared to remain somewhat buried after three decades.

The challenge of plastic pollution - a hot-button political issue over the last year - is not necessarily reduced by solving the mystery.

The container remains inaccessible and it is not known how much of its cargo is sealed within it. Another issue is that the novelty items that escaped and continue to wash up on Brittany’s beaches will not decompose in a human lifetime.

Once a common household item, its eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, and thousands were made and sold during the 1980s. Collectors still buy and sell the vintage Garfield phone online today.