Simon Bernard's private war on plastic pollution began in 2016.

From the deck of the cargo ship he was working on, Bernard was stunned to discover mountains of rubbish piled up in Hann Bay, once a white sandy beach that had become an open sewer in the Senegalese capital Dakar.

Thickets of rubbish were almost everywhere along the coast, "washing into the sea with the tides and waves," the 34-year-old sailor told AFP in an interview.

It was, he said, a terrible shock. "At sea, you don't see the plastic."

Deeply moved by seeing fishermen pulling tangled webs of plastic from their nets, Bernard -– newly graduated from France's Merchant Navy -– enlisted another engineer, Alexandre Dechelotte, to embark on what he dubbed "Plastic Odyssey".

The plan was to complete a round-the-world expediti

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