Time to say no to packaging nightmare
THE SPECTATOR’S VIEW
Litter is pervasive. It is strewn across our sidewalks, it fills our gutters. It clogs sewer drains and befouls our streets, clings to the chain link fence at schools and strip malls, blows through pristine woodlands.
Some of it was born innocently as a cigarette or a soda pop, a candy bar or a coffee-to-go, a lottery ticket or a Popsicle stick, toothpaste in a box, batteries in a shrink wrap, the tag on a shirt ...
It ends in a disagreeable mélange that reminds us of our immoral existence.
When the snow melts each spring, those reminders reveal themselves anew, and for lakeshore cities such as Burlington, Hamilton, Stoney Creek, Grimsby and others, they announce themselves with an acute glare, washing up on beaches with other flotsam.
If it were just shoreline litter, we might be able to dismiss it as an ugly cost in a world addicted to packaging. And some good citizens even endeavour to clean it up.
Unfortunately, it is much more than that. Much packaging is plastic, and that plastic persists. A convenience to humans and valuable for no more than a few moments, plastic survives abandoned to the elements for centuries.
The result is that the Great Lakes, and indeed vast areas of our oceans, are like a plastic soup.
One study estimates 22 million pounds of plastic finds its way in to the Great Lakes every year. Another estimates there are 43,000 microplastic particles in every square kilometre of the Great Lakes. In Lake Onta- rio, dotted as it is with large urban centres on the shoreline, the levels can be as high as 1.1 million particles per square kilometre.
This material, of course, is eaten by wildlife — fish, birds, mammals — and ends up in the food chain.
Even if you are not a scientist or a biologist or lover of nature, you can see plastics and pollution are gumming up our waterways and beyond. What can you do? Governments, including those in Canada, are moving to ban so-called microbeads, which are used in shower gels, scrubs and toothpaste. You should simply avoid such products containing microbeads.
Meanwhile, plastic packaging may be necessary, but not all of it, and plastic on shorelines is particularly troublesome. French fry forks, for example, were once made of wood, and some still are. Straws were made of paper. Plates or to-go containers were cardboard, not styrofoam. Insist on these items from retailers and restaurateurs.
Whether these alternatives are necessarily better for the environment is open to debate, but many do not persist the way plastic does.
Ultimately, we can all do our part simply by refusing plastic packaging and other plastic conveniences. And when we do find ourselves in possession of such material, we can more strenuously endeavour to recycle or reuse it responsibly.