As some of you know already, I am a beach walker. Thats right folks, I am one of those do gooders that walk my adopted beach every morning picking up the rubbish that is left, washed up or just magically appears over night! For some time now we have been hearing of this big vortex in the middle of the pacific full of plastic, and thought, why cant we just send a flotilla out to pick it up? Well folks I understand now why that is not as simple a solution as one might expect.
Let me use as an example an innocent plastic bucket. It could be a bag, a crate, drum, whipper snipper chord, bottle top,.... anything plastic.
The forementioned bucket, relatively soft and plyable washed around in the ocean soaking up the sun where it goes hards and cracks and eventually cracks. Still relatively large and although ugly, not likely to danger birds or fish.
Forward some more time and a tad of surfing and maybe even a few encounters with rocks and the now brittle plastic smashes into smaller and smaller peices untill eventually they are tiny, bite size morsels for everything from birds and fish, right down to being mistaken for micro plankton eaten by everything from whales to the bottom of the foodchain fish, eventually finding its way to the top!
My point friends, is that plastic does not disintergrate like food products into usable helpful waste back to nature. It merely becomes smaller and smaller pieces of plastic doing more and more damage to our environment, beautiful wildlife and even harder to collect.
So floating around in the ocean, in land fill and littered along our roads and countryside is ever decreasing bits of plastic doing increasing amounts of damage!!
Please think about that next time you pass a brightly coloured object and put a smile on yours and my face by picking it up and disposing of it in a more appropriate venue.
Thank you in advance
Adventurer on land and water. Into Bikram Yoga and keeping fit. Add sailing, surfing, paddling and riding my Harley and we're getting somewhere!
