There are special commemoration – or activist, if you will – calendars for those who celebrate “holidays” as they fall. If you’d looked at one on 8 June, you’d have seen it was World Ocean Day. But even without a calendar you couldn’t miss it. What was the topic of the day? Marine litter, of course. With all the cleanup projects hitting the headlines, it’s hard imagine there is anyone still unaware of the problem.

Conspicuously absent on 8 June this year was news of French-American architect Benoît Lecomte, who last year donned a wetsuit and left Japan’s shores bound for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As it now emerges, he quietly got out of the water a day later, but the now 51-year-old made a splash in the US press a few weeks ago with plans to try again on the “ocean” holiday.

So where is Lecomte now? Even his Facebook promotion page hasn't been updated in a year. Have the problems dogging Dutchman Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup project got him down, or is afraid he’ll swim afoul of that device’s plastic boom if it starts retaining what it scoops up?