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A small, red, seemingly nondescript Lego brick washed ashore, well-weathered by the sea. It could have easily been missed among the kelp and pebbles and other refuse that the ocean regularly spews up on the beaches of coastal England.

But it caught the attention of the “Lego Lady,” as Tracey Williams is known among the fishermen who ply their trade around Cornwall.

It was a noteworthy catch, a first for Williams – a “CB radio” block from nearly five million Lego pieces swept into the sea 25 years ago.

The toys, many seafaring in theme, were being transported aboard the Tokio Express in the winter of 1997 when the ship was rocked by a rogue wave 32 kilometres off Land’s End. Sixty-two containers were lost to the watery depths.

But over the years, the ocean has released some of the cargo. Williams has found, cleaned and recorded thousands of pieces of Lego.

The discovery of the little red CB radio last month — however fun it seems — is particularly symbolic: a beacon of sorts, ahead of next week’s UN Ocean Conference warning of the permanence of plastic and the threat it poses to marine health.

“People say what I do is part whimsical, part doom-laden. And I think that’s quite true,” says Williams on the phone from her home in Newquay, less than a minute from the beach where daily walks with her dog nearly always end with a few pocketed pieces of Lego or other finds, from toothbrushes and shoes, to lobster trap tags that drifted over from Canada. “You know, it’s fun to find a bit of Lego, but it’s shocking to see how much plastic there is in the ocean.”

Plastic makes up 85 per cent of marine waste. Some 11 million tonnes of plastic, be it from mismanaged use on land or from marine activities like fishing, enter the ocean each year, entangling species and destroying habitats. Most of it is non-biodegradable, breaking down instead into microplastics and ingested by shellfish, birds, mammals, inhibiting growth and affecting reproduction. Early research is also pointing towards a deleterious impact on human health.

The second UN Ocean Conference starts in Portugal Monday and picks up from the first in 2017 with a focus on solutions, beginning with a session on pollution.

“It is clear today that our plastic waste is contaminating our ocean from top to bottom and from the equator to the poles,” says Chelsea Rochman, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto. Rochman attended the first conference and has been part of a UN ad hoc group working on a global plastics treaty.

“The industry is no longer debating whether or not we have a problem. Now, it’s a debate of what they’re willing to do in order to change.”

The Canadian government this week announced a ban on certain single-use plastics. This follows a similar ban by the European Union last year.

It is a cross-boundary issue that will require governments and industry buy-in, says Rochman, but also the public’s awareness.

And this is where a beloved toy can maybe make a difference, says Williams whose book “Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea” is being published in Canada next month.

“Lego is something everybody identifies with. The spill has given us a platform to talk about plastic in the ocean.”

Growing up holidaying on the English coast, Williams had beachcombing in her blood. The detritus that washed up on the sand was like found treasure to a child, and when Williams had kids of her own, she introduced the tradition to them.

In the months after Tokio Express lost its cargo, beachcombers discovered little spear guns, miniature cutlasses, wee flippers. Williams’ first find was a piece of green Lego seagrass.

“I remember taking it home to show the rest of the family and just being amazed that, of all the things to find, plastic seaweed on the beach. And then we started to find more … if you were really lucky, you would find a dragon or an octopus.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, an American oceanographer was also taking an interest in the toys.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer had been tracking container spills and ocean currents since 1990, when 80,000 Nike shoes fell off a carrier and surfaced on the Pacific Northwest coast up to Haida Gwaii. Two years later he modelled and recorded the route of 28,800 capsized bathtub toys. When the Tokio Express lost its cargo, Ebbesmeyer reached out to Lego’s headquarters and the company sent him a manifest.

For a data collector, it was a bonanza of information: Among the million missing bits were 33,427 black dragons and 514 green ones, 97,500 scuba tanks, 51,800 sharks and 35,000 CB radios.

Lego also sent him one sample of all 100 pieces that had been aboard. Ebbesmeyer put them in his bathtub to see what would float and what would sink. Back then, in his newsletter “Beachcombers’ Alert!”, he predicted certain blocks would make their way to Florida.

Life then got busy for Williams. Living inland, she eventually forgot about the Tokio Express spill. But in 2010, she bought her current home, and on her first visit to the beach she discovered a yellow Lego life-jacket.

She was taken aback, not only by the amount of plastic washed up on shore, but that the sea was continuing to surrender the tiny toys.

Williams, like Ebbesmeyer, with whom she started a correspondence, found herself “quite interested to find out who else had found the Lego and ... how far it travelled in the intervening years.”

In 2013, she launched “Lego Lost At Sea” on Facebook to document her finds. Soon other wannabe archeologists were adding to it. Pieces were identified in Ireland and Northern France, but the bulk washed up in England. There’s been no authenticated finding in Florida.

“It surprised me that they more or less stayed right there for Tracey to work on it,” says Ebbesmeyer, author of “Flotsametrics and The Floating World”. Ebbesmeyer, who eventually sent the Lego sample box to Williams, surmises that a lot of pieces might still be trapped on the ocean floor in disintegrating containers.

A recent research paper on the weathering of Lego in a marine environment predicts they could last up to 1,300 years.

“What appalls me is, if it’s an oil spill, then the government sends all kinds of people out there to clean it up. And there are lawsuits,” says Ebbesmeyer from his basement home office in Seattle filled with toy soldiers, Barbie parts and other beach refuse. (The book “Adrift” notes the Tokio Express’s insurer paid for the initial cleanup.) “But if plastic spills, nobody does anything about it. I think humanity has a blind spot and plastic is it.”

More than 90 per cent of the world’s traded goods are transported by sea and at any one point there are 6,000 ships carrying containers around the globe. According to the World Shipping Council, 1,382 containers are lost at sea each year. Ebbesmeyer suggests the number is undercounted. Poor ship design, improper and over loading and climate-change induced storms are all to blame for goods going overboard.

“We’re passionate about keeping Lego bricks out of nature, and we don’t ever want Lego bricks to end up in the sea,” says Tim Brooks, Lego’s vice president of environmental responsibility. “The cargo spill from the Tokio Express was an unfortunate accident ... The Lego Group is very serious about taking care of the planet.”

The company has launched sustainable initiatives around packaging and reuse, including a program that accepts used Lego in the United States and Canada and, in turn, donates to children in need.

“Our Lego bricks,” says Brooks, “are incredibly durable ... so they can be handed down from generation to generation rather than being thrown out.”

This is not a story of “you know, Lego made a mistake,” says Rochman. “We ship so many plastic products around the world and there are spills and accidents.” This is more about how we use plastic, says Rochman, co-founder of U of T Trash team, a scientific-based outreach and advocacy group.

“Every single person interacts with plastic. We all use it ... We all waste it. But we all live in a watershed ... you are always upstream of some river or tributary that eventually empties out into a larger water body,” says Rochman, noting the Great Lakes are some of the most plastic-ridden bodies of water she’s studied.

Rochman is optimistic about a global treaty, which she envisions as being similar to the Paris Agreement on climate change in which plastic pollution would be considered an emission and signatories would agree to reduction targets.

“We need to shift from a linear plastic economy, which means we make it and we use it and then we waste it, to a circular economy where we continue to keep reusing.”

On any given day, Williams is faced with the result of society’s “relentless consumerism.”

On just two beaches last year, she picked up 700 abandoned toys: flimsy buckets, shovels and bodyboards, all of which were likely transported to England, sold cheaply at the seaside and then, left behind, to be swallowed by the ocean — if not for the “Lego Lady.”

What happens to the beach finds?

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