Things that shouldn’t be found in the Charles River
Along with hundreds of other volunteers I spent this morning picking up trash from the banks of the Charles River (a surprisingly hazardous undertaking, as I found out when my friend got attacked by an irritated Canada goose). In two hours I filled a large garbage bag covering a relatively small area that didn’t even seem all that dirty at first glance. Here are some of the things I picked up:
- one baseball hat and one sock
- rusted metal chain and wood with nails sticking out
- random ropes and ribbons
- plenty of broken glass
- cigarette butts, packs and lighters
- lipsticks
- many plastic bottles and bottle caps, plastic candy wrappers, chips bags etc
The most frequent items picked up, however, were:
- plastic shopping bags
- an astonishing amount of styrofoam, most of it undeniably from Dunkin Donuts cups
Luckily, these are also some of the easiest items to avoid as a consumer by bringing your own coffee mug and your own shopping bags. Some establishments will even give you a discount for doing so (and they should, since every bag and every cup costs them money). But how to get the word out to those who can’t be bothered to think about this (particularly not before their first cup of coffee)?
Bah.
These items are an invaluable resource for the future. Over time this trash will become mineralised - future archaeologists and geologists will find rich deposits of tampaxite, dunkindonutite, and the thin plastic-item layer (which correlates so well with the great extinction that the archaeologists will argue it was the plastic bottles themselves that killed the panda). Most valuable of all will be diaperite deposits, a permeable trashic karst rich in a nitrous biogenic mineral oil.
So go put that trash BACK - think of the future!