…marine litter revisited

This weekend will see a small but important step forward in the effort to reduce marine litter at its source – us, on land.  On Saturday MegaMart, one of Jamaica’s largest retailers, will make handsome re-usable “eco-bags” available (for a small charge) at all three of its stores.  Several other local retailers have started selling inexpensive cloth bags in the last year or so.  However, MegaMart has taken two extra steps to make the program effective.

First, they will stop handing out free plastic bags.  Second, their cost has been greatly reduced by selling space on one side of the new bags to major advertisers.

Plastic bags have been demonized by “green” campaigns all over the world.  They’ve been banned, taxed, sold where they used to be free, and generally made a mark of shame in some communities.  Laws and taxes won’t get rid of trash and won’t make people tidy, but they do make the throwaway culture of “use it once and drop it anywhere” a lot more expensive.

Every September, the International Coastal Cleanup records details of the trash that thousands of volunteers remove from beaches, shorelines and river banks around the world.  In 2009, the last year for which complete records are available, more than ten million pieces of garbage weighing 3.7 million tons went into the ICC data base.  Bags (paper and plastic) accounted for about 14% of the total.  For Jamaica the number was much higher, at nearly 21% compared to about 15% for the rest of the Caribbean and 8.5% for the U.S.

The other major sources of marine litter in the Caribbean are bottles –mostly plastic drink bottles – and the fallout from food and drink.  Bottles – more than 38,000 of them -- accounted for almost 30% of Jamaica’s shoreline trash on 2009 compared to about 22% for the rest of the Caribbean, 9.4% for the U.S. and 13% for all countries combined.  This sharply underlines the need for a national or regional recycling program with regular collection, supported in part by a deposit on plastic bottles.  (When all soft drinks came in glass deposit bottles, no bottle laid on the roadside for long!)

Food and drink waste seems to be a universal problem, accounting for about 30% of shoreline trash almost everywhere.  It’s still a hazard to public health and safety, a breeding ground for germs, parasites and vermin.  In places like Jamaica that depend on tourism, discarded Styrofoam box lunch containers make an eyesore that’s dangerous to our prosperity.

Plastic bags, however, are especially dangerous to marine life.  Birds, fish and other creatures can get tangled in them, with (usually) fatal results.  Fish, dolphins, birds and turtles swallow them by mistake, thinking they’re jellyfish, sponges or other food.  It’s also been recently discovered that when salt water and sunlight starts to break these bags down, they put chemicals into the water that are dangerous to both fish and corals.

Reducing the number of plastic bags in circulation is a useful first step toward reducing the amount of trash in the sea.  Every Jamaican can help to reach this goal.  We can all be a bit more careful in our habits, using fewer disposable things and putting our trash in bins instead of dropping it wherever we finish with it.  Also – and this will require effort and persistence -- we can all press for more local and national programs that will make a big difference.