counting all the pieces

From Miwa:

Marti, baby, and me–made the trek today to Oahu’s Windward side for B.E.A.C.H‘s clean-up of Laie Beach. This rural beach was littered with all varieties of plastic debris, and about 35 volunteers were there to pick it up and try to count it. Hundreds of bottle caps, plastic nets, and plastic refuse, washed up from all over the world. Years and years of plastic debris.

Plastic takes hundreds (possibly thousands) of years to biodegrade–what it DOES do is break into smaller and smaller pieces over time. In addition to the ancient toothbrushes, lighters, food wrappers, plastic pens, and styrofoam takeout containers, we found a beach littered with a confetti of small plastic bits.

I talked to a man who said he has lived on Laie for over 30 years–he was out on the stretch of beach beside us with a leafblower. A regular task, he says, trying to blow the plastic bits mauka, up off the beach. He talked about how he has seen the plastic problem get worse over the years. I asked him about the future, and he said he envisions his beach eventually “covered in a layer of colorful plastic grains, floating above the heavier sand and collecting a layer of algae slime.”

We finished our clean up a few hours later, and I felt a pang of sadness, looking at the result. More trash will wash in to replace what we cleaned. And even the many pounds we had piled into trash bags, was simply going off to a landfill. We can move it around as much as we want–but the plastic we create today is with us forever.

When we eat our lunch from a styrofoam box, it should make us think a bit: something with a useful life of minutes (okay, maybe a few days) will exist in our world–where we play and swim and hike and live–forever. Our great-great-great-great grandchildren will share the world with our old styrofoam cup. Along with the other 25 billion that we throw away each year.

We can do better. Hawaii is the final destination for a lot of the world’s plastic rubbish, washed up here by Pacific currents. Even in the remote and uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Hawaiian islands, plastic trash–marine debris–is a problem.

Happily, a few of our electeds are listening and we have a few opportunities this year to stand up here and show the world it can be done. This is historic, progressive stuff. And if we don’t, who will?

One current proposal to ban styrofoam takeout containers in Hawaii in 2010. To learn more and to support SB2495 and HB2495, go to www.stopstyrofoamhawaii.org. The word from those folks is that SB2495 has a second hearing scheduled for 2/14 and desperately needs to be heard to get out of committee! Send in those letters!