Rubbish - it really makes me angry.

I know that I am not the only person who gets angry about rubbish - well more specifically litter. I have a sticker in my car window that asks people politely to pick up their rubbish.  Please use the bins provided. Please put your picnic or takeaway trash back into the bag that you used to bring it here and take it home with you. Please do anything - except leave it  on the promenade where it will blow into the sea.

The old idea of a message in a bottle, has to be updated in the age of global communication. Plastic bottles float and billions of them are now floating around in our oceans, trapped in circulating currents, forming massive islands of discarded, non-biodegradable material, surrounded by swimming chemical silage. Marine life is dying as result: sea birds, whales and larger fish get trapped and perish or they ingest the poisons that humans discard so carelessly.

I have recently been to a Greek island, where simply because the pipework is too narrow, it is forbidden to even put paper down a toilet. I live by the seaside and every time I walk along our beautifully modernised seafront, I am sickened to see plastic bottles, carrier bags, tins and takeaway food wrappers, blowing around or bobbing in the water, waiting to be picked up by the tide and carried out to sea. Why people imagine that the sea is a suitable receptacle for their rubbish is beyond me. What do they imagine happens to it all when it leaves their sticky mitts and drifts out of sight?

NASA have been tracking floating plastic buoys equipped with satellite tracking devices for over 35 years in an attempt to identify the circulating currents in the largest oceans on our planet. The picture shows were they are. In the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, an area where the warm waters of the South Pacific meet the colder flows from the Arctic, a plastic island has expanded to such a huge mass that it has been given a name.   The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Pacific Trash Vortex) visible from space and soon to be visible from the West Coast of America, more specifically California.

Messages in Bottles

We are the literati:
a 'sling it' generation,
the scourge of every nation
when disposing our debris.

Out there in our oceans
are a multitude of islands
emerging from detritus
that we dump into the sea.

NASA have been tracking it
by satellite and mapping it;
charting the expansion
of this flotsam misery.

There's one in the Atlantic,
another South of India,
heading for Australia,
two others, maybe three.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
fed by hydro-plastic highways,
lies off the West Coast of America,
circulating happily.

Sea creatures who alight on it,
caught inside the blight of it,
wallow in the swell of silage,
leaked by industry.

Every day increasing
moving closer to the coastline,
a pelagic plastic island,
of pollutant dysentery.

Thanks for reading.  Adele