Mermaids Hate Plastic is a 2016 photo series by 📝Benjamin Von Wong depicting mermaids stranded on 10,000 plastic bottles — the number of bottles a single person uses in a lifetime.

The math drove the image: at an average of 167 plastic bottles per year, one person will have used roughly 10,000 by age 60. Von Wong borrowed that many bottles from a waste center, and volunteers washed, de-labeled, and sorted them by color before arranging them into fantastical shapes — a giant droplet of water, a vibrant typhoon — as the backdrop for models in mermaid tails made by designer Cynthia Brault.

The series went viral and became an early proof of the formula Von Wong would later scale into monuments: everyday objects, a shocking statistic, and fantastical staging that makes the statistic impossible to forget.