Suicide by Trash
This past week, town workers have gone and cleaned the ditches and shoulders of the road we sit on. Now, on my morning walks, not only do I have room to escape from a car without having to entangle myself in brambles, I can also look and see the detritus of our civilization.
Plastic wrappers, plastic bags, soda and water bottles, shredded Nestea cans, tattered cigarette packets, and a plethora of beer cans litter the ditch. It's amazing what people will throw out of car windows. Then, there's the debris left behind from a recent accident; pieces of a bumper, side mirror, and other pieces of hard plastic with no discernible relationship to a car.
Generally, Europe is a clean place. At least, it is compared to Boston. I remember the last time I went to Boston (fourteen years already!), stepping out of the terminal at Logan airport onto the street. The first thing that caught my eye was the trash. Despite a large trash can, everything was scattered on the ground. The streets of the city were cluttered with wrappers, gum, cigarette butts, and everything else.
Walking the streets of a European city, one might find some trash somewhere on the ground, but it's rare. There are street sweepers daily, sweeping up the inconsiderations of the dumb. In the summer, firefighters hose down streets that might become offensive. The municipal trash cans, where everyone must deposit their trash bags, are washed weekly at least. Yet, Spain's countryside belies the cleanliness of its cities.
I don't remember seeing trash along the well-kept French roads when we visited five years ago. I'm not aware of roadside trash in Portugal. But Spain's roadsides seem to collect the trash that the city doesn't want. There is a field across the road from us. It belongs to a cousin, but he has never complained about us using it to cut and cure our firewood. A few years ago, when it had been cleared, our daughter decided to clean up what she could. She filled various trash bags with the junk she found scattered all over the place. And that was only in a small portion of the field. She even found old rags that had once been clothing.
We, as a society, once used to throw nothing away. We never owned so much as now, either. My mother, who would have turned ninety this month, had only two dresses as a child. One was for weekdays, and the other for Sundays. She was the oldest, and the Sunday dress would be passed down to the other sisters. Once, when she was a young teenager, her uncle, who lived in the United States, sent them a box of clothes. My grandmother, mother, uncle and aunt (the youngest aunt hadn't been born yet), put on the new clothes, and posed for a photograph to send him. I still have a copy of that picture, which is the only picture I have of my grandmother, and of my mother as a child.
Now, we have clothes up the wazoo. Apart from the fact that they are badly made and of inferior quality, which helps us to throw it away sooner and then buy more, we buy different clothes for different purposes. Clothes to wear for exercise, clothes to wear to work, clothes to wear at home, clothes to wear for dirty chores, clothes we wear to go out, clothes we wear for special occasions, etc. A t-shirt acquires a small hole, we throw it out and buy two more. I am guilty of liking to have a nice range of clothes for different days and different temperatures. But I have decided on a moratorium of buying, at least for the rest of the summer. I have enough. I have too much. And when it gets thrown out, it'll simply go to a landfill.
Plastic is ubiquitous. Whatever we buy, clothes included, has plastic in it, on it, or around it. Even if I take my own shopping bags and avoid paying for plastic bags, everything is encased in plastic. None of it is biodegradable. I see difficulties replacing plastic in certain areas of life, but in those where it's unnecessary, there's too much. Where the plastic ends up is everywhere, including the sea.
The equivalent of 33,800 plastic bottles is being dumped into the Mediterranean every minute. The currents take and concentrate some of the plastic into certain areas. Those shorelines with the most amount of plastics, in order, are: Cilicia, in southeast Turkey, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, the Po Delta near Venice, Valencia, Alexandria, Algiers, Bay of Marseille, and Izmir. In Cilicia, the concentrations of plastic are about 31.3 kilos per kilometer. The Mediterranean, so diverse and rich in life, is being choked.
This year, the beer producer, Estrella Damm, put out its annual commercial, and it's different from other years. It's generally always about summer on the Mediterranean shore, and this year it's about the plastic in the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, its intention is to sell, and to sell the company as sustainable and clean, even if it might not be as clean as it claims. But the message is there. We can't continue to poison the oceans if we want to keep living well. And living well doesn't mean abusing our resources. It means using them wisely, so that we continue to have them and so that our planet continues to nurture us, and doesn't spit back at us.
Plastic wrappers, plastic bags, soda and water bottles, shredded Nestea cans, tattered cigarette packets, and a plethora of beer cans litter the ditch. It's amazing what people will throw out of car windows. Then, there's the debris left behind from a recent accident; pieces of a bumper, side mirror, and other pieces of hard plastic with no discernible relationship to a car.
Generally, Europe is a clean place. At least, it is compared to Boston. I remember the last time I went to Boston (fourteen years already!), stepping out of the terminal at Logan airport onto the street. The first thing that caught my eye was the trash. Despite a large trash can, everything was scattered on the ground. The streets of the city were cluttered with wrappers, gum, cigarette butts, and everything else.
Walking the streets of a European city, one might find some trash somewhere on the ground, but it's rare. There are street sweepers daily, sweeping up the inconsiderations of the dumb. In the summer, firefighters hose down streets that might become offensive. The municipal trash cans, where everyone must deposit their trash bags, are washed weekly at least. Yet, Spain's countryside belies the cleanliness of its cities.
I don't remember seeing trash along the well-kept French roads when we visited five years ago. I'm not aware of roadside trash in Portugal. But Spain's roadsides seem to collect the trash that the city doesn't want. There is a field across the road from us. It belongs to a cousin, but he has never complained about us using it to cut and cure our firewood. A few years ago, when it had been cleared, our daughter decided to clean up what she could. She filled various trash bags with the junk she found scattered all over the place. And that was only in a small portion of the field. She even found old rags that had once been clothing.
We, as a society, once used to throw nothing away. We never owned so much as now, either. My mother, who would have turned ninety this month, had only two dresses as a child. One was for weekdays, and the other for Sundays. She was the oldest, and the Sunday dress would be passed down to the other sisters. Once, when she was a young teenager, her uncle, who lived in the United States, sent them a box of clothes. My grandmother, mother, uncle and aunt (the youngest aunt hadn't been born yet), put on the new clothes, and posed for a photograph to send him. I still have a copy of that picture, which is the only picture I have of my grandmother, and of my mother as a child.
Now, we have clothes up the wazoo. Apart from the fact that they are badly made and of inferior quality, which helps us to throw it away sooner and then buy more, we buy different clothes for different purposes. Clothes to wear for exercise, clothes to wear to work, clothes to wear at home, clothes to wear for dirty chores, clothes we wear to go out, clothes we wear for special occasions, etc. A t-shirt acquires a small hole, we throw it out and buy two more. I am guilty of liking to have a nice range of clothes for different days and different temperatures. But I have decided on a moratorium of buying, at least for the rest of the summer. I have enough. I have too much. And when it gets thrown out, it'll simply go to a landfill.
Plastic is ubiquitous. Whatever we buy, clothes included, has plastic in it, on it, or around it. Even if I take my own shopping bags and avoid paying for plastic bags, everything is encased in plastic. None of it is biodegradable. I see difficulties replacing plastic in certain areas of life, but in those where it's unnecessary, there's too much. Where the plastic ends up is everywhere, including the sea.
The equivalent of 33,800 plastic bottles is being dumped into the Mediterranean every minute. The currents take and concentrate some of the plastic into certain areas. Those shorelines with the most amount of plastics, in order, are: Cilicia, in southeast Turkey, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, the Po Delta near Venice, Valencia, Alexandria, Algiers, Bay of Marseille, and Izmir. In Cilicia, the concentrations of plastic are about 31.3 kilos per kilometer. The Mediterranean, so diverse and rich in life, is being choked.
This year, the beer producer, Estrella Damm, put out its annual commercial, and it's different from other years. It's generally always about summer on the Mediterranean shore, and this year it's about the plastic in the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, its intention is to sell, and to sell the company as sustainable and clean, even if it might not be as clean as it claims. But the message is there. We can't continue to poison the oceans if we want to keep living well. And living well doesn't mean abusing our resources. It means using them wisely, so that we continue to have them and so that our planet continues to nurture us, and doesn't spit back at us.
Comments
Post a Comment