Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Trash in the San Blas


You can pretty much bet that on the windward shore of every outer island in the San Blas you will find a thick border of plastic crap lining the beach. Past a stretch of sand and tangled in the vegetation, plastic bottles, unmatched flip flops, knock-off Crocs and other petroleum-based detritus of the modern world sit in stark contrast to the delicate shells and pebble-like sand, the typical makeup of an uninhabited island in the Kuna Yala.

We were warned about the trash in the San Blas, and I expected there to be the usual mingling of soda pop bottles and food wrappers and chip bags in the bigger villages like Nargana and Porvenir. But I did not expect such a level of trash on tiny islands where no one lived and in the water. Case in point, we were entering an anchorage in the Eastern Holandes, where only a couple of Kuna families live, and perhaps due to a larger than normal tide debris was floating on currents in the water, including all manner of plastic junk amongst the seaweed and logs. In the same spot where we’d seen multiple sea turtles, plastic bags were suspended in the water in a line across a gorgeous anchorage. All this begs a question. Where does the trash come from?

A lot of it comes from the Kuna, floating out from the larger villages, and though I’ve seen no evidence of this, a bit of it must come from cruisers too. But I think the bulk of the trash comes from the outside, paralleling the ocean-side shore of every island, and that most of that plastic trash is brought in on the waves, on some faraway current, to be deposited in this rare and lovely spot where it will sit forever next to the shells and the hermit crabs and the pebble-like sand.

It’s enough to make you never buy another plastic bottle again.

8 comments:

  1. Very sad... When I was there in 1988 there was no trash that I remember. We just added a filter to our galley foot-pump because we were tired of all the plastic bottles we were using for drinking water!

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  2. Yes, I too made sure I had a filter so I could drink tap water instead of bottled water. However, nothing wrong with using bottles as long as you dispose of them correctly.

    I've noticed here in the Bahamas the Haitians and Jamaicans are who throw trash everywhere, so it woulnd't surprise me that a lot of the trash there comes from Haiti and Jamaica.

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  3. What I find sad is that, it is me, the out of towner, who is picking up the trash. I have no investment in this country but yet I seem to do more for it then they do.

    Did you pick up the trash you saw? I have a folding old army shovel you can use to bury it with :)

    Not that you didn't pick it up, but I have an issue with stupid liberals sending ships out to study and analyse the plastic floating island in the Pacific instead of cleaning it up. Just one decent size ship with a net can sure take a big chunk out of it, like say the big ship they used to go out and study the gunk.

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    1. It's probably easier to get funding to study it than to clean it up. No one wants to pay for that. :(

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  4. That is a very sad thing. I've read what other cruisers have written about seeing trash literally in the middle of nowhere. I'm glad you've seen no evidence of cruisers causing this kind of pollution.

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  5. It's estimated that 10,000 containers fall off of cargo ships every year: http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/05/10000-shipping-containers-lost-at-sea-each-year-heres-a-look-at-one-2/

    Although these aren't likely responsible for the trash you're seeing, it does give an idea of just how bad the situation is.

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    1. Actually, those containers end up in the bottom of the sea. When they fall off, there is a lot of air trapped inside but eventually they all sink. It may take a few weeks, but they do sink and I'm pretty sure those doors don't open (otherwise we would be seeing packages on the beach, like Xbox consoles).

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  6. When I was on Bonaire, they told us that the Venezuelans where pouring trash straight into the sea at several ports. Sad.

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