ALT She’s a space junk picker-upper A golden cube with solar wings Faster than a bullet She picks up broken things Earth watchers, callers, mappers - Circling fifteen times a day Small as a loaf or big as a bus Helping us text and find our way But when they conk out, blink and twitch They’re just abandoned; broken eyes Until Elsa zooms to find them And cleans our messy skies

ALT Thunder Fact: There are more than 36,000 pieces of space junk circling our planet. ELSA-M is a real space mission designed by a company called Astroscale. It’s a satellite that can find and collect bits of broken spacecraft and old satellites that float around Earth.

ALT The Great Big Clean Up – Christian Foley Sometimes we don’t know where to begin we got lost in a problem, like “how can we win!?” A wild wave of panic starts whirling us frantic the problem is big, MASSIVE, GIGANTIC TITANIC, ENORMOUS, it’s EPIC in fact a GIANT GARGANTUAN grim garbage patch… it’s piled up for ages, not out of the blue nearly two trillion pieces, so what could we do!? We piloted planes, we bounced on our boats we plotted a plan for this plastic that floats pinpointed the place, precise and specific we monitored, mapped and marked out the pacific we measured this messy expanding expanse the size of the patch? Three times of France! C’est terrible! Mais ne perdez pas Espoir* don’t drown in despair, that’s not who we are.

ALT No problem’s too massive, gigantic or epic we humans don’t give up, oh no we go get it there’s hope in the water, you’ll find when you rummage have courage, have heart, ‘cos we humans aren’t rubbish… We found what we’re facing, so then we could face it we traced round the trash, we tracked it and chased it we picked it, plucked it, cleaned thousands of tons so the hurt in the past will one day be undone…

ALT THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH BLUNDER FACT The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a massive soup of floating rubbish in the Pacific Ocean, trapped by swirling currents and made of millions of bits of plastic, bottles, bags, nets and microplastic dust. Sea life gets tangled or eats it by mistake. THUNDER FACT People are fighting back! A group called The Ocean Cleanup is using huge floating booms to sweep plastic from the sea and stop more from getting in. Their goal is to clean up 90% of ocean plastic by 2040.

ALT On a white piece of paper, a student has written a poem. The title "Seaweed" is written in rainbow colours. The illustrations include an orange and blue striped fish, a red octopus and a shark with pointy teeth. The poem reads: From the old ship, to the swimming fish, to the seaweed swaying along with the fish. From the rusty metal, to the rock hard coral and the anemones swaying on the rocks. The shooting shoals of silver fish to the sea slugs slithering along the ship.