This is Where Your Trash Goes

Part of our coastal vacation included a trip to visit a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Esmeraldas. Isaac helped him with a tourist mapping project (that will hopefully be up soon for all to see and use!), and we also got roped into doing a beach cleanup (I say "roped in" only because we thought we were going to see the mangroves, didn't, and ended up stranded on a beach with our guide and a bunch of trash bags--but it was okay!)

I've heard a lot about the Pacific Garbage Patch and the baby albatrosses who fill their stomachs with plastic. I've taught how "all our litter eventually ends up in the ocean" (which is hyperbole, but not really). But I didn't actually GET it until I saw the beach in Muisne.

I don't want this blog to be a giant guilt-fest--there's enough of that elsewhere, and I don't know if it's particularly helpful or healthy. I do want to share some photos and some of the thoughts I had while working on the beach so that you can maybe think my thoughts with me.

Let's start with a pretty landscape of the beach.

Everything in the ocean eventually gets washed back on shore. This beach was covered in mangrove leaves and sticks, logs, shells, and other animal remains, like this guy:

A dead puffer fish. Don't step on him--he's spiky!

We don't really need to worry too much about plants, turtle ribs, or sand dollars, though. They'll biodegrade, turn into sand or soil, and be useful again. Dead and rotten stuff is good. Things that don't die and rot? Not good. Like this plastic wrapper.

"No! I'm a leaf--really!"

Plastic is by far the most prevalent kind of trash you find. ANYWHERE. Leaves aren't trash. Sticks aren't trash. Shells aren't trash. (ahem they should not go in your trash can ahem). Those things have eternal use. Plastic doesn't. It isn't food. It doesn't turn into sand or soil. Nobody wants it. Even we don't want it--which is why we throw it away. The kind of scary thing is that we make so much plastic stuff that is MADE to be thrown away, like these water bottles.

(Notice Isaac's reusable metal water bottle in his backpack!)

So what happens to that plastic? Well, the stuff we picked up will either be put in a landfill (which, really, isn't a super great solution either) or it will be recycled (again, recycling plastic isn't actually that great of an option). The stuff we didn't pick up will mostly break down into littler and littler pieces. It will get buried by sand, washed back out to sea, float around with plankton, get eaten by plankton, wrap itself around coral, and release toxins. (This article talks a little more about this stuff.)

Some little chunks of plastic. When it's done breaking down, it will be a handful of microscopic confetti.

What really struck me when I thought about this was the fact that most of the trash on the beach was invisible.Some of it's too small, and how much of it is buried in the sand?

A plastic bucket buried in the sand. I didn't have a shovel or time to pull it out, but I really wanted to know what was in it. Or maybe not...

There are other forms of trash we found, also.

A corroded battery (as a related story, I recently learned that some people in the jungle open batteries to use the lead as fishing weights...)

Big trash. Part of a concrete fishing pond that got loose in a storm and ended up here. It reminded me of when they tore down the casino in my hometown to build a new one. LOTS of trash.

Tires. I think they were maybe placed on the beach to combat erosion, but the tires have other plans. I think they want to be schooners.

I didn't see any exploding baby albatrosses, but I did see this little crab trying to get a piece of nylon rope off his foot.

He didn't want my help...

We didn't find too much metal. In most places, it's valuable enough that people recycle it. If it does end up as litter, it rusts or oxidizes and ends up (mostly) useful again. There was some glass. It's also not as concerning as plastic since it's inert and will happily, eventually, turn into sand again with enough pounding of the waves. But why would you toss out something as reusable as a glass bottle?

A glass Gatorade bottle in the middle of the picture. They're fairly common in Ecuador.

 
The whole clean-up felt kind of futile, actually. We didn't clean up nearly all of the trash we could see, and this was just a one-hundred meter section of beach--of all the beaches in the world. We picked up three measly sacks of trash--that could end up back in the ocean for all I know.

Our guide posing with our trash sacks.

So er... right. I said I didn't want this to be a guilt trip of a blog. You can go read that article from SERC if you want that. The big point of this, the main thought I had while cleaning this beach, was that it didn't have to be like this. There's no reason for there to be so much plastic, and there's no reason for it to be on the beach. It doesn't belong in my backyard, it doesn't belong in the hallways at my school, it doesn't belong on the beach.

We also know better than this. The three Rs have been bashed into our heads our entire lives (and Ecuador is catching up to us in this matter). Don't buy so much disposable stuff. Don't buy so much packaged stuff. Use stuff over again. Recycle. Don't throw trash on the ground. If you see trash on the ground, pick it up. (If you think that's hard, you SHOULD feel guilty.)

Justin can pick up trash. So can you.

Stay tuned for some ways you can do the Reusing part of the three Rs. It will be fancy!

..kirstie..

This post is part of the Rethinking High Tech series.