Stop Trying To Clean Up All The Plastic Waste
Honestly, can’t we just stop making, buying and subsidizing it?
Very Unpopular Strong Opinions Blog by Christyl Rivers
My heart won’t go on
Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing another photo of a marine animal trapped by plastic trash. Garbage killing a baby elephant in Sri Lanka. Albatross chicks starved by parental feeding of what looks like prey. A turtle killed by a plastic straw up her nose. Entire coastlines having livelihoods and all life destroyed by a massive spill of nurdles.
Accumulative plastic is hurting your body, and disrupting endocrine systems in multiple species, including our own.
It happens each and every day.
But you also see good news, right!?
People are cleaning up beaches. They are picking up roadways. They are inventing giant booms to skim the ocean. They are engineering sieves. They are discovering “plastic eating micro-organisms.” They are discovering ways to use social media to get beach flash mobs together.
In short, they are taking on the giant blob of a monstrosity we have made.
Stop cleaning up plastic waste. Just stop it.
Unless…
That is, unless we are going to stop it at the source, why continue to make it, buy, it and kill everybody with it?
I am convinced you want your bottles, bags, and bling, and are made to feel better that some people are out there doing their best to counter the onslaught.
It’s a plop in the ocean.
Your beverage container today will likely take five hundred years to disappear.
Our human hearts, and mental health, may not last nearly so long.
The blob is coming
Why are the people, landscapes, seascapes, and most of all, animals having to pay for clean-up? Why not have the profiteers chipping in?
Why are those who mine it, refine it, pollute neighborhoods with manufacture, put it in fast food and fast fashion free from fees? It is in literally everything from the product, to the packaging, to the distribution, to the aforementioned, tormented, turtle.
There are alternatives, fiber, bio-degradable, hemp, glass, and more.
Let’s demand that they help clean up their mess.
A long time ago, on a nearly plastic free planet, far, far away, there was this blob Garbage patch thing that was relatively small.
That blob from whatever that ancient movie, The Blob, (it looks like plastic, but a much more manageable amount) was beautiful compared to what we pay for now. If I remember correctly, people freaked out at the all-consuming blob. They screamed. Howled. Fainted. Were consumed by it.
Not we! We are non passive, heroes. We’re out there, hand-grabbing the itty-bitty fraction of all that pollution. And we are so proud.
We should be ashamed.