Plastic Not So Fantastic

Because my daughter and I both take packed lunches I have accumulated a few plastic spoons which we re-use. (It saves my daughter losing our teaspoons at school - not that I think she would).

So I was washing the dishes this evening when I broke one of these plastic spoons. "Don't know my own strength," I remarked wittily to Mrs H and, as I dropped the two halves of spoon in the bin, I started thinking how many people would regard plastic cutlery as throwaway? How many would regard washing plastic cutlery as just a bit sad?

But at the root of this pondering was the nagging echo of a quote, "Every piece of plastic ever made is still with us." Or something along those lines. And that lead me to think that maybe plastic should, due to its inherently resilient properties, really be regarded as hazardous waste. I mean, never mind when the bastard plastic eventually breaks down, it only forms small particulates that then enter the fucking food chain. It doesn't go away.

I wasn't sure about that quote though so Google was the most obvious next step (a surprisingly common answer in many situations these days) and I came up with this headline in the Independent from Feb 2008: The world's rubbish dump. The hit is due to this quote from Tony Andrady, a chemist,"Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," as he describes a vast expanse of plastic debris floating in the Pacific Ocean. The story is appalling in its depiction of how careless we have been in our treatment of the environment and how our own rubbish may eventually find its way back to our homes - as part of the food on our plates.

Another site I discovered was Midway Journey where, in their own words, "Five media artists, led by photographer Chris Jordan, traveled to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to witness the catastrophic effect of our disposable culture". The Atoll "serves as a lens into one of the most profound and symbolic environmental tragedies of our time: the deaths by starvation of thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food." The picture at the top is the stomach contents of a dead bird, which have been deposited as the bird decayed, and has been photographed exactly as it was found.

And there you go. For anybody still thinking its a bit sad to wash up plastic cutlery for re-use, I'd rather do that than feed it to the birds or eat it myself for that matter.