Dutch ‘Plastic Soup Surfer’ in Vatican to press Pope on bottle and can deposit system

Dutch environmental activist Merijn Tinga, known as the “Plastic Soup Surfer,” is set to meet Pope Leo XIV on Thursday in Vatican City to push for a bottle and can deposit system, arguing it could help drive similar policies in Italy and other countries, RTL reports.

Tinga, 53, is currently in Rome after completing a long-distance campaign from Nice to Rome on a surfboard made of compressed litter and recycled plastic. During the same trip, he is also scheduled to meet Monaco’s Prince Albert II.

He brought the letters from Dutch mayors, including officials from Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The letters reportedly include Rijkswaterstaat data showing that bottle and can litter fell by about 70 percent after the nationwide deposit system was introduced in the Netherlands.

Tinga told RTL he plans to enter the Vatican’s private library “just in my surf outfit.” “The only catch is that I’m not allowed to wear shorts, so I’ll have to wear long trousers,” he said. “But I’ll still wear my surf shoes and T-shirt. Basically, just as I would stand on my board.”

The Vatican campaign is the latest in more than a decade of Tinga's expeditions aimed at highlighting plastic pollution. It began during kitesurfing trips between Scheveningen and Zandvoort, where Tinga said he noticed increasing amounts of plastic waste along remote stretches of the Dutch coast.

He later expanded the effort into international crossings, including a surf journey from Oslo to London, travel to Paris, and a record kiteboarding crossing to England, using boards made from melted PET bottles and other discarded plastics. He now brings his long-running anti-plastic campaign to the Vatican.

The Vatican meeting comes as Tinga continues to promote a shift in focus from ocean cleanup to upstream prevention in rivers and on land. “The more we started measuring and the more evidence we gathered, the clearer we saw that most plastic never even flows into the sea,” Tim van Emmerik, a hydrologist at Wageningen University, told Trouw. “Most plastic will probably never reach the sea. It gets stuck somewhere along the way—on land, but also in rivers or river mouths.”

He said waste often accumulates in riverbank vegetation, shrubs during high water, or infrastructure such as locks and harbors. Van Emmerik estimated plastic concentrations along the Maas riverbanks are 100 to 200 times higher per square meter than in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.