Beach at Half Moon Caye

I recently spent a week camping on Half Moon Caye, a small island about 50 miles east of mainland Belize. It’s a bird sanctuary (mainly red footed boobies and frigate birds) and a World Heritage Site, not too far from another World Heritage Site, the famous Blue Hole.

It was wonderful to unplug and enjoy a world without computers or phones and mostly without electricity (there was generator power for a few hours) for a whole week.

Red footed booby

We kayaked, snorkeled, lounged in hammocks, and went scuba diving. It would have been a perfect experience, except that when we walked on the white sand beaches or snorkeled among the coral outcroppings, we inevitably encountered plastic. Plastic bags floating in the water, plastic bottle caps amid the vegetation, plastic rings that hold on bottle caps and hold six-packs together. Plastic toys in the sand.

You can’t get away from plastic, no matter how far away you go. It’s depressing. What’s a nature lover like me to do? You can choose to use cloth bags but you can’t get away from plastic packaging in stores these days.

Plastic litter on a beach

At home, I try to do several things to cut down on my guilt. I use cloth bags for shopping most of the time. When I do end up with a plastic bag, I reuse it until it develops holes, and then I stuff it in the bins at grocery stores and pray that the store actually recycles all those bags.

I pick up all those blasted plastic pellets that the neighborhood boys (who are apparently terrorists in training) shoot out of their fake machine guns. But after I’ve collected them, I still need to dispose of them. Those brightly colored little round pellets are the perfect size to zip down the storm sewers and wash out to the streams and eventually to the sea, the perfect size for birds and fish to gobble down, believing they are fish eggs. I so wish those pellets were illegal to manufacture. I wish all non-recyclable, non-biodegradable items were illegal to manufacture.

I do have a lot of plastic in my kitchen, because I am a big consumer of leftovers and I need to store them. I wash and dry my plastic zip-lock baggies and reuse them whenever possible. If a grocery item comes in a plastic container with a lid, I wash and reuse that too, whenever possible. My family tends to think it’s because I’m cheap, but saving money is only a side benefit: I’m trying to keep as much plastic as possible out of the waste stream. I use aluminum foil when I can, because I can recycle that in my town.

Trail on Half Moon Caye

I know that some companies are marketing biodegradable “plastic” items made of corn and potato starch. I recently read that burning plastic for energy may be our salvation in the future; it does come from petroleum, after all.

I hope the solution arrives soon. We are all part of the problem now, but we can all be part of the solution tomorrow.

I dream of a day when fish and birds and sea turtles don’t die from eating plastic. I dream of walking on pristine white sand beaches and swimming in an ocean that is clean and healthy.