Posted: Tuesday 30 August 2011
Plastic
At the start of this term Dr McCarthy from the Biology department spoke to staff about the current state of our Eco Schools initiative. It is going well, but we need to have another big push to reach our target of Green Flag status. One aspect of that involves being better at recycling: of paper, cardboard and of course, plastic. She used one picture which particularly caught my attention – it was of plastic rubbish washed up on a beach in Dumfriesshire.
I spent some time on the island of Tiree again this summer, and invariably find myself wandering along the strandline on beaches and rocky shores, seeing what I can find. There is an amazing amount of natural history to be found in these places; amongst the seaweed there are shells and broken bits of crustaceans, bryozoans, echinoderms – even fish, birds and mammals. I spoke to someone who last year had come across the carcase of a Cuvier’s beaked whale in a remote bay – an extremely rare find. But on all of these wild beaches there is a depressingly large amount of plastic, mainly in the form of pieces of rope from fishing nets and various bottles , cartons and containers – flotsam in other words. Imagine how much more plastic there must be in our seas which does not float, and so is hidden on the sea floor rather than being brought in to our shores.
Plastic is one of our most incredible inventions. It is difficult to imagine life now without it in its many forms. We can see through it, listen through it, wear it, eat from it, drive around in it and most of our everyday ‘tools’, electrical or otherwise, are made from it to some degree. Is there any point in your day when you cannot reach out and touch a piece of plastic?
In the 1960s people wrote books about it, excitedly telling us what a wonder substance it was, and would be. All they described has indeed come to pass, plus a lot more, which overall must be seen as a good thing. But the strangest part of the last fifty years is that the more ubiquitous plastic has become, the less we seem to actually see it.
It is frankly appalling that all round our coastline lies a rim of coloured plastic. The same could be said of our countryside, as every roadside verge has its clutter of old crisp bags and discarded drinks bottles. I’m not saying that we should uninvent plastic, but obviously we ought to find better ways of recycling it, and educate people about how wrong it is to simply throw it out of a car or a boat.
There are lots of ways in which plastic has served humanity very well. But above all I think we ought to make sure we do not stop noticing it, when it turns up in the wrong places.