This is F hijacking Tigger's blog again because as he pointed out yesterday he doesn't get to go swimming. It's getting steadily hotter here so after cycling this morning (an activity that might have to go on hold again soon) it seemed a good idea to go across the road for a swim. (It is a public holiday in Greece today.)
From our balcony you can't see right into the inner corner of the inlet. So it was with great disappointment that I arrived down there to discover the floating raft of rubbish that Tigger and I had spotted at sea on that day of strong wind (and which had miraculously disappeared yesterday), had reformed, regrouped, and arranged itself in the corner where I usually launch into my swim.
The main body of the raft appeared to be completely dismembered expanded polystyrene - nurdles I believe they are now called - probably millions of them. And bobbing about in this gently billowing surface scum were dozens of plastic bottles, tennis balls, and various other miscellany of discarded plastic. It covered an area about 10m x 20m - so probably not enormous but way to big for me to scoop off the water by hand.
I swam around it.
I felt guilty.
I swam back, clambered up the shore, went home and dragged the paddleboard out for its first season outing, grabbed an empty 70litre compost bag, quickly made a make-shift muslin net (which proved to be completely useless) and headed back.
Strange things rubbish rafts, by the time I had returned it had not come ashore as I had expected it to (it had been within a metre of doing so) but had begun to disperse again and was spreading itself over 150m or so a bit further out in the inlet. It was no longer a collected 'raft' but a sort of strand line at sea.
The point of all this rabbiting on is not that I collected rubbish at sea, but that of the 70 litre bag full that I did collect, most was rubbish you couldn't see on the surface of the raft. The raft had in fact formed on top of a dense collection of semi-floating/floating-submerged, film plastics: plastic bags, cellophane wrappers, chip packets. And by rough estimate 95% or more of the rubbish collected represented food and drink consumed 'on the move' - or smoking. Masses of it was cellophane wrappers off silly things that don't need wrapping - like plastic straws, cigarette packets, individual sweets and tiny packets for individually wrapped biscuits. There were 2 or 3 dozen bottles and cans, and plastic cups (and their lids) for the whole of Athens, but the most difficult to see/collect and identify were clear plastic film bags, and pieces of bags that had clearly washed about in the sea for a very long time.
Shoes, tennis balls, some aerosol cans, and a lone shampoo bottle made up the 5% or so 'other'.
The good news is that apart from that one shampoo bottle (and possibly the aerosols but they were rusted), I would not have called any of this rubbish household waste. So it would tend to suggest that rubbish is not being thrown into the sea, but blown into the sea;having been dropped by people too busy to sit down to eat/drink/smoke and too rushed to look for a rubbish bin to put their waste wrappers in.
And that last observation surprises me, because I had developed the impression that Greek culture placed great value on 'the meal' - eating together, taking time over food. (Coffee is another subject and Local-Kiwi-Alien gave us excellent insight into that one earlier this week. So I will just link her, you don't need my views.)
Anyway, nurdles aside (I need to get a good fine nylon net), I might have got half of what was available to get. Having climbed back up the rocks with the deflated paddleboard and 70 litres of wet plastics, I looked back to realize that looking down from that height I could clearly see the quantity and extent of the uncollected stuff. That had been more than too much sun exposure for me already so it is a task for another day - or rubbish to pick off a shoreline somewhere nearby. To be fair it has never been this bad in the 18 months we have lived here so maybe we just experienced an unusual combination of wind-directions that brought it all together in this place at this time.
And my question is: are there organizations we can join to campaign for (1) an end to completely pointless packaging, or (2) to make those packaging their products in this way pay for cleanup and disposal, (a sort of polluter-pays scheme), or (3) to encourage someone to invent properly organic packaging that contributes to rather than detracting from the environments it finds itself in at the end of its useful life (which for most of these was an incredibly short, one-trip useful life)?
PS: I've just realized there is also another type of question in this post - what was there to feel personally guilty about? And what cultural conditioning contributed to that? (I grew up with Tidy Kiwi campaigns.)
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Hari OM
ReplyDeleteExcellent questions 'F'!!! Another of my own pet peeves... knowing that culturally there are countries where dropping litter is still just a matter of course doesn't help to ease the mind. To be fair, apart from the weather pattern, it may also be that there have not been the usual 'street-sweeping', 'sea-swiping' activities that help to prevent such build=up.
There are lots of researchers working on things like using natural products such as plant cellulose or shrimp shells (one decidedly vege the other less so, but still way better than plastic). Getting these to a reasonable commercial production cost is the bigger challenge - as always. The idea of not having food wrapped is a horse that has bolted, I fear, and for as long as we have supermarkets and long supply chains, it will ever be thus.
So we need to tackle end-users and persuade them the packaging is, for the most part, completely unnecessary. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth both have ongoing petitions and activities around this, but otherwise it tends to be down to the individual to write letters to CEOs of supermarkets (which I have done on more than one occasion!), to packaging producers and also to local newspapers, addressing one's community. Points to be made are that local is better, fresher and environmentally as well as economically sound; that the majority of produce has its own 'packaging' and other than meat, there is very little which requires more than a paper bag; and in relation to all this, to eat what is native and in season for the majority of our consumption... or at least grow 'exotics' locally and charge accordingly for the privilege.
Of course, then comes the issue of those who cannot afford the inevitable rise in costs.
It's a HUGE subject. But starting back at the raft outside your window - I applaud you for taking at least this much action. Researching what responsbility the local council/sea authority take in regard to rubbish control - and petitioning them for improvements - might be as good a placeas any to begin your environmental activism! YAM xx
Thank you YAM. I get the point about food packaging, and I have absorbed arguments made by the sellers that packaging like the plastic skin on cucumbers (doh?) actually prolongs shelf life and saves thousands of tonnes of food waste every year. Trade off.
ReplyDeleteIt's more about what I see as idiot packaging - individually wrapped biscuits for example. When did a packet (or box) of biscuits need to be turned into single wrapped biscuits? And water in discardable bottles. I have no idea what a plastic bottle costs, but water is so cheap that whatever the bottle costs it (along with bottling/transport/marketing costs) is more than the contents. So having drunk the contents the more expensive part of the purchase is simply thrown away. I wonder if people really think about that. Salads purchased with plastic cutlery encased in their own cellophane wrapper, a napkin in a cellophane wrapper, salt in a cellophane wrapper....
Interestingly it was obvious that sealife (plankton?) had started to grow on these films, so their surfaces provide a 'raft' for life of some kind; it's what happens when the next creature up the food chain tries to eat that growth that is worrying.
I wasn't having a go at Greeks or Greece in this - the fast food thing is everywhere I have lived. (Read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma") And to be fair the quantity of fresh local produce traded here without any packaging at all surpasses anything I have seen elsewhere in Europe, NZ, Aus. The labels on the packaging pulled from the sea are not uniquely Greek ; these things have been produced all over Europe (the world?), and could have made it to the sea, this sea by 100's of routes. One thing we do know around Greece is that a lot of the rubbish that washes up on beaches comes from shipping (and possibly yacht charter industry has a role in this too). The Med is a great big sea-lane to the world's shipping and not every flag or crew has qualms about dumping their domestic rubbish at sea.
Hari OM
DeleteOh yes, I appreciate it wasn't just a Greek focus, neither was my response. This is a global issue and I 100% agree about the extraneous packaging. In focusing on the food angle, I was merely suggesting it is a place to start. The plastic bottle issue is a huge one; having lived some time in India, I can tell you that this is one of the biggest issues there - the bottled water being the best option for just about the whole population due to contamination from piped water always being a risk... so I get that there is a need in such places for water purity, but it does beg the question as to how to improve that!!!
As I said - its is all connected and such a huge issue. Thus we must start where we can, and that is encouraging folk at the individual level to resist such packaging. Even as one who 'preaches' this, let me tell you, it is almost impossble to avoid. The next step, then, is to ensure re-use where possible and careful disposal where not.
But then comes the fact that our recyclings is not all it's cracked up to be... I try not to get depressed about it, but it's hard sometimes! YAM xx
I so know what you mean about avoiding packaging. I made my own cotton bags (old t-shirts) for the produce market, but lots of people live in what Ron Finley describes as a food prison (so far from where it is produced that everything they have access to is processed in some way, (transported, stored etc), and only available for purchase in a 'super market'. And shopping in a supermarket anywhere just gets more and more depressing.
ReplyDeleteSide note: my nephew's wife in Canada related a tale whereby the local COVID regs prevented them from reusing carrier bags - but they could still pay for their purchases with cash. In her words - 'go figure'. Ayla is super-green so she was really offended.
(I added that waiver about Greece in case anyone else reading thought I was doing the highandmighty outsider thing. I do beach cleans everywhere I've lived.) They say information is power, perhaps instead of binning the rubbish I should have analysed, weighed /counted/identified as much of it as I could and posted the result online somewhere. Lots of apps and programmes available for that sort of thing these days and I have to hope (because I'm technologically challenged) that someone is genuinely interested in using the information they are encouraging people to gather.
The north wind brings in very small rafts of rubbish down into the bay below us. We used to go down after a winter gale to see what new treasures had arrived. Although there were a lot of plastic bottles the majority of it was odd shoes, plastic toys, suncream bottles, household oddss and sods, even 3 ID cards once. We decided most of it must have fallen overboard from yachts.
ReplyDeleteNow and again the council sends out workers with big black bags who pick up bottles, croissant wrappers and paper coffee cups from the verges. Often we will find a plastic chip bag or a coffee cup in the middle of our mountain road. I think the fish farm workers must just chuck their breakfast containers on their way up.
Education. My grandchildren get lesson at school on recycling and green living. We are given lectures now and again by them. The younger generation don't litter as much, I think.
All those fish farm workers should be made to attend a lecture on keeping the environment clean.
Coming from NZ I regard litter as everyone's personal responsibility. When we go out even just for a swim we take a bag for our rubbish. It is a plastic bag unfortunately but greeces campaign to do away with plastic bags has had some effect. A lot of people will have their own shopping bags with them at the supermarket now. And we have to buy plastic rubbish bags instead of using the supermarket ones. Rather defeating the purpose.
We all have a long way to go
Have you ever wondered about those shoes? How do so many shoes get into the sea. I found a stiletto on Sunday. Good on you for cleaning beaches when you go there. I got caught up in a UK campaign called #2minutebeachclean, which advocates a quick clean up around you whenever you go, and puts bags and picking sticks and bins for disposal at any beach which has a local 'sponsor' (person willing to maintain the installation and empty bins). Anyway the habit kind of sticks.
ReplyDeleteFriends at work say the same about the youngsters - their kids are coming home pumped up with recycling enthusiasm. One got up one morning and couldn't find a lunch box anywhere in the house - 3 year old had identified them as plastic and put them all in the recycling bin. I occasionally overhear parent and young child discussing which bin to put their rubbish in outside our apartment (blue for recycling). It may still not be cool to be a litter-conscious teenager however.
And yes - the rubbish bin liner conundrum; I'm still trying to find the answer to that one. Did we always have rubbish bin liners? And if so what did we use before plastic?