Plastic with your Chips ?
Summer is on its way and the beach and waves will beckon soon. People will be packing picnic baskets and shaking out their beach umbrellas and checking whether last year’s togs still fit.
Do you wonder what’s in the seawater you will swim in this summer? Sadly, we have already added huge amounts of microplastics to seawater, the bodies of marine animals and to our own bodies. Up to 35% of all microplastics in the ocean originate from textiles, weighing somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 tons. A Wellington Harbour study collected sponges chockablock with microplastics, with some containing more than 1000 particles of plastic per gram of sea sponge. What we don’t want to do is to keep adding to existing levels. It’s a bit like adding carbon to the atmosphere leading to eventual eco-systems collapse.
What can we do to not add to the sobering microplastic stats? Well, for one thing you can wash your clothes less often. For example, don’t put those togs, which are likely to have ‘plastic related’ fibres, in the washing machine, where agitation will release those fibres. A gentle cold hand rinse will do and then you can put them on line for the sun to finish the cleaning. This goes for the rest of your summer wardrobe. Sometimes a spot clean will do. Decades gone by people got by with just two sets of clothes, one for work and the Sunday best set but with the advent of the fast fashion industry and the invention of washing machines people are often filling their washing machine two or three times a week. This grey water eventually makes it way, either via the water table, streams, or stormwater to our Moana. You can, also, invest in a filter for your washing machine or buy an object that plucks up microfibers, like the Guppyfriend wash bag. From 2025 washing machines sold in France will be required to have a microfiber filter.
You can, also, look at the clothes you buy for this summer season. Is that T-shirt, you will eventually wear on an island beach made with a natural or synthetic fibre? Cotton is better than plastic based textiles but in manufacturing uses a lot of water. Linen is the best but is often more expensive.
Those other things you take to the beach, towels, picnic basket and food and drink containers, beach shoes and reading material, not many of them are going to be put in the washing machine when they are dirty, but it’s possible to ‘forget’ things and even be a bit careless, when you are sun-soaked, relaxed and sleepy and maybe shepherding tired salty children at the end of your beach day. Trampers have a phrase “Pack it in, Pack it out”. ‘Leave no trace’ means just that so look around before you go home and if you worry you or your family might forget, try to reduce the plastic objects you take to the beach e.g. no plastic straws, or picnic cutlery or containers, or plastic coated magazines.
A clean sea is a happy sea and isn’t this what you want when you are sitting beside her soaking up summer?
By Sue Fitchett
Project Participant