I couldn't help but wonder where it would end up ...
When I go biking in the country side surrounding our town, I find a wide assortment of plastic bottles, wrappers, bags and other assorted trash caught in the grass, bushes and trees along the roads, and more often than I care to think about I've watched a plastic bag roll across an open field like a modern tumbleweed ... All of it has been posited there by someone just idly tossing their trash to the ground, assuming it will take care of itself ...
Sadly, it does take care of itself, but NOT in a way that is at all environmentally friendly ...
The wind carries it out of sight ... but the problems are just beginning ...
Currently I'm reading the book "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman wherein he contemplates what would happen on this blue-green planet if the human species suddenly and simply DISAPPEARED ... his thesis and his findings are startling. But what disturbed me was not so much the demise of the human species, but his chapter on what may perhaps be our most lasting legacy: PLASTICS !!
He cites findings by researchers and common citizens who have learned that plastic polymers (a modern invention) have not only overwhelmed the natural environment, but DO NOT break down ... Instead these polymers become smaller and smaller, and remain in the environment unchanged and unaltered ...
Weisman illustrates this frightening reality with the discovery by a sailor who found deep in the heart of the Pacific Ocean a place where the ocean currents don't flow and where thousands and thousands of tonnes of plastic waste has been posited in vast modern "kelp" beds ...Weisman and those who are investigating and researching this disturbing occurrence point out that the BILLIONS of plastic shopping bags, the TRILLIONS of pieces of plastic wrap, and the uncountable plastic containers and packaging that we so casually toss aside each day as a species MUST end up somewhere ...
Some goes to land fill where it sits unaltered for a millenia ... some gets recycled into other plastic and rejoins the cycle of wastage ... some gets packed off somewhere, to be dealt with by someone else ... but too much is blown away by the wind and eventually ends up in plastic drifts in the fences and bush surrounding out communities and worst of all - it blows off into the vast oceans that surround our island habitat where in time it congeals in vast plastic beds that WILL destroy and devastate not only the marine environment, but the tiny blue-green planet we call home ...
Just because that plastic bag blows away in the wind doesn't mean it has gone away ... the stories of turtles, whales and other marine species dying from consuming plastic bags floating in the water and looking like OTHER marine life that they DO eat are legion ... If we truly care about the environment, even on the heart of the prairies ... we will begin to make BETTER choices ... and we WILL be careful about what we do with the wastes we generate ...
Our future as residents on this fragile planet depends upon it ...
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