The Cost of Plastic

A couple of days ago we conducted a landing at Isla Guanape off the coast of northern Peru. The island, a national reserve, is home to thousands of nesting Peruvian and Blue-footed Boobies, Peruvian Pelicans, and a handful of other species. The island has a history of guano harvesting for fertilizer and several old structures and rusting equipment dot the arid, vegetation-less landscape. But its not the old equipment or buildings that were disturbing. The high tide line on beaches is supposed to be dominated by broken shells, dried seaweed, and driftwood, but on Isla Guanape it was a nearly unbroken line of plastic bottles. Disposable water bottles, oil cans, 5 gallon water barrels, coke bottles, or busted plastic buckets. Plastic bags, and unidentifiable garbage rounded out the mess.

It’s easy in such a situation to point the finger at Peruvian park service for allowing their reserve to become so littered, but we’d be better off pointing the fingers at ourselves. Our oceans are filling with plastic. The rotating ocean currents known as gyres are circulating the stuff around the world and some enormous stretches of ocean are essentially covered in the junk. What we saw scattered on the beaches was a small portion of nearly endless supply of litter that continuously circles the seas. Every Dasani water bottle we use, every single serving coke bottle that isn’t recycled or reused has to end up somewhere, and all too often, that isn’t the local landfill but the world’s (formerly?) blue oceans.

The Peruvians don’t clean up their beaches because the constantly circulating plastic just refills the area in a matter of days or weeks. Take thousands of miles of coastline and the job quickly becomes impossible.

So what’s the solution? Easy. Stop using plastic bottles as much as possbile. And those you do use, be sure they end up at a recycling center and not somewhere they’ll end up in the ocean, or strewn across the landscape.

Plastic kills millions of seabirds, sea turtles, fish, dolphins and whales, and all manner of other ocean life. Isla Guanape and its garbage is just one place of thousands where the problem exists. Do the ocean and a favor and skip the plastic.