We must stop dumping plastic poison into sea
IT looks like the tide is turning, it feels like attitudes are changing and at last it appears that, as humans, we are catching on to the fact that chucking plastic waste into the oceans and rivers is a dumb thing to do.
I first wrote about this after an overnight ferry journey to Ireland 40 years ago.
I couldn’t sleep so was wandering about on deck with a hip flask for company and remember being struck by how white the gannets plumage was in the moonlight: just stunning.
My nocturnal birdwatching was soon disturbed by two crew members pushing large bins on wheels towards the leeward side for, soon to be revealed, obvious reasons.
The bins were swiftly hoicked onto the rails and the contents, including waste food and plastic items, were emptied unceremoniously into the Irish Sea.
At first I thought something along the lines of ‘the lads have that off to a fine art’, as both bins were done and dusted inside a minute.
Of course, four decades later, I realise my thoughts were a little inane, but even more sobering is that some of those plastic items I saw hit the water on that night, will still be out there floating around or clogging up some river inlet and, what’s more, will continue to do so long after I have left.
As a species we are learning all the time, unfortunately, even in the face of the facts, we sometimes hesitate to do the right thing.
For example, the dumping of nuclear and other toxic wastes may have become more regulated in recent years, but that stuff takes millennia to break down... or does it? How will we ever know? Dumping of military and commercial waste in the North Channel only ended in the 1980s.
Disposal of radioactive waste from Sellafield since the early part of this century is much reduced.
However the problem is still there: only last year the dumping of millions of tonnes of toxic sludge from the Hinkley Point nuclear site started in the Bristol Channel.
It has the potential to contaminate not just the south coast of Wales and inland waterways but also the northern part of the Celtic Sea and its ingress into the South Irish Sea.
The legacy of radioactively contaminated pollution will probably last tens of thousands of years, so while we need to ensure that we combat the dangers of plastic in the marine environment lets not forget the bigger picture.
Manx writer, Bernard Moffat says,
”Our knowledge of the Irish Sea is much better now than when Windscale (now called Sellafield) started pumping out filth in the mid fifties.
“Remember back then scientific knowledge was so vague that Windscale scientist John Dunster, who later, in a stroke of irony, went on to head the UK Radiological protection organisation and was knighted, thought it apposite to dump controlled discharges of radioactive waste into the marine environment around us to see how it and we would react.”
In an ideal world, which it isn’t, no waste of any description should be dumped in the oceans, except, perhaps, treated sewage.
There are no excuses these days, as new evidence is flashed up daily on social media, of turtles, dolphins and whales all struggling to make their way through a veritable soup of plastic.
Perhaps most memorable in recent times were the photographs taken by the RSPB on a remote South Pacific Island of the decayed bodies of dead albatrosses, stomachs and craw full to bursting with hundreds of small items of plastic.
My fellow, Fellow, Sir David Attenborough, of the British Naturalist Association – nothing like a bit of name dropping but we are both Fellows of the association – seems to be getting the message across and what better stage than the main stage of Glastonbury Festival 2019 to do just that.