Trash on Board, on Land & on the Beach.
Living is minimized on board, we have less clothes, toys, books. But we need equal amount of food. It’s just that on land, we can produce as much trash as we like. On a boat, we keep our trash until we reach land. Some people throw their trash overboard, they think that cans recycle. Pix of recycling times !!!! Although aluminum breaks down over time, it takes a long time and so that cans do litter the ocean floor.
Nothing is more disenchanting than to arrive a beautiful beach and to be greeted by trash humans left behind. Or trash that washed ashore.
The way we deal with trash aboard is that we try to buy in bulk and fill those things like rice, flour, corn meal in reusable containers. The CEO of Walmart approached the original owner of the toothpaste company Tom’s a while back, on how he could introduce sustainability into his company and help the environment. True story, I met the consultant who advised the Tom’s guy. At first the Tom’s guy was startled, ‘Walmart wants to go green?!’ and than he came up the idea that Walmart could impose on its suppliers to use less and environmentally sound packaging. The Walmart guy liked the idea and implemented it. The consumers didn’t even notice a change. Foods in bulk are so far only available at farmers markets, Co-ops and Whole Foods in the US. There is now a supermarket in Berlin, called ‘Original Unverpackt’ (Their website here) (article in the The Guardian here) where you bring your own food containers, and can buy one of theirs, if you forgot. The idea is, again, to reduce trash.
When we cannot buy container-free, we leave as much of the packaging on land as possible. No cardboard and boxes on board at all, because roaches lay eggs in cardboard back in the warehouse and we don’t want any on our boat!
We buy cans over glass bottles and plastic bottles, because they can be made smaller and get ice cold in the fridge. Another factor is that Mexico only recycles aluminum.
With all of that, we still we produce a lot of trash. We divide our trash onboard into ‘organic trash’, ‘dry and clean’ trash, ‘recycling’ and ‘just trash’.
We have one container, which seals air tight for ‘organic trash’, which we throw overboard on passages, not in the anchorage. The water is often so clear, and banana peels, avocado pits etc take a long time to break down and would make the bottom of the bay unsightly for any snorkeler and diver.
We keep the ‘dry and clean trash’ in a bag such as paper, bottles and plastic wrappings and packaging. If those are not clean, we wash and dry them. We try to make all of it as small as possible. We keep the ‘recycling’, in Mexico that means only aluminum cans, in another bag. We have another container, also airtight, which is for the ‘just trash’, which is the rest and is very little.
When we get to a port or fishing village, we bring the trash ashore. I am not always comfortable with that, because I am sure that the recycling doesn’t get recycled and because I see often trash on the beach, so I worry, that the trash doesn’t get to the recycling or trash processing plants.
Often, I have the impulse to bring a bag and clean the beach near a village, but I feel that it is not my business to meddle in their affair and how they keep their beach. We are guests. But I do wonder, why there is trash on beautiful beaches. Doesn’t the community see the beauty or doesn’t it see the ugliness of the trash? Don’t they care? Apparently not enough to change it. To bring my trash there, would be hypocritical. So, we hold on to our trash, adding more and more every day.
I was never aware of how much trash I produce. It is so much more apparent to me now, than it was living on land or in a marina. I know, that we humans will bury ourselves and the planet one day in our trash. Like in the movie Wall-E, where Wall-E’s job was to move and bundle trash all day on a planet of trash into trash cities. We are trying to do our part in keeping our planet and ocean clean, but we still have a long way to go and to change our food supply system to deliver food without packaging. I saw once in an US supermarket, peeled oranges in a plastic container, totally dried out. Why not leave fruit in it’s original packaging, which is it’s peel and peel it before eating? I think, this describes perfectly how we perceive food and food preparation these days. A can, a bag, a carton and it’s content get’s mixed together as a meal, or the entire meal comes out of a box. Or it’s fast food.
We totally lost the connection with real food and our mountains of trash attest to that. We used to walk to farmers markets and put our produce in a basket we carried under our arm. Now, we drive to supermarkets and carry home packaged food and even the produce is put in bags. Let’s hope a little awareness will go a long way and change this wrong at the core. And that we will appreciate food again, as we did in the past.
We have been trying to hunt down farmers markets here in Mexico and have found, they have been nearly entirely replaced by supermarkets. Only some small organic farmers markets exist in places like La Paz and Loreto. The best fruit and tomatoes we found so far in small tiendas in fishing villages and at an organic farmers market in La Paz. Situated in a hip part of town, the market nevertheless proofed, that a back-to-the-natural movement exists in Mexico as well.
Actions sometimes have an effect, sometimes a ripple effect. Maybe I will bring a trash bag ashore next time and clean the beach no matter what the villagers think. Maybe this is my business, as much it is theirs. If their trash flies into the ocean, it’s polluting a communal place, the ocean belongs to all of us!
