The plastic plague. Photo: Jason Childs
We are the plastic society.
Bottle tops and bladderwrack. Rockpools everywhere are filled with discarded synthetics. Crabs scuttle around coke cans and crisp packets, their new unpopular neighbours. With each slippery step, plastic shards fill ponds of Palmaria Palmata. With each new wave, the habitats of dulse sea lettuce flakes are invaded by tiny toy soldiers, escaped from landfill or flushed ignorantly down toilets. On the front line, they use their tiny AKs to shoot any signs of life around them. Screw tops take cover within the Irish Moss. Crushed Carlsberg cans lay still on Coralline rocks. An army of trash has infiltrated our reefs, commencing the war against industry and consumerism.
Ghost gear is strewn beyond the harbor, like lost hair fibers, trailing down onto the pebbly beach. Strands of fisherman’s rope forms tangled nests on the shoreline, unfit for any kind of bird. Their lines are carelessly lost at sea, ready to entrap marine life. Modern plastics occupy the crags between each pebble on the ancient coastline. It’s bundled beneath driftwood and washed up seaweeds, out of sight in the tide wrack. Mermaid’s tears are hidden amongst the desert of sand granules. Red, yellow and blue, these tiny, raw plastic nodules are ingested by fish and transferred to dinner tables.
I’m crouched down, surrounded by my squadron. They’re all armed with bags, buckets and gloves, covering any areas I miss. Amongst the rubble, the usual suspects; plastic bags and cotton buds, bottles and cigarette butts. But unidentified floating objects are what we’re really up against. These unknown, misshapen stoppers and bungs live amongst egg cases and shells, mysterious, camouflaged, and unaccounted for. They come in all colors, shapes and sizes, leaked from nuclear power stations and factories. Without warning or labels, they’re poured into the sea by careless manufacturers, without care or thought of the lives they are impacting.
As I work my way through the sand dunes, litter picker in one hand, recycling bag in another, I come across a blue trough. I peer inside to find goose barnacles, in double figures, settled around its brim and on the walls of its stomach. Half filled with rain water made slightly salty by the sea air, crustaceans have adopted this washed up flotsam as their home. But this is not where they belong.
Marine litter is created by humans, packed by humans, delivered by humans, opened by humans, used by humans, and disposed of by humans. It’s deposited into waterways, rivers and oceans, out of sight and out of mind. Human-created waste continues to accumulate in oceanic gyres; in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it exceeds plankton numbers by a factor of six. Eventually, it makes its way back to us, depositing itself on our coastlines, to remind us that we are the ones guilty of polluting our planet.
Ghost gear will continue to haunt us until we take action and work towards removing the plastic already in our oceanic environments and on our coastlines.
We are the plastic society, that will choke to death on our waste.
