While South Africa was warming up to play host to the world for FIFA’s 2010 soccer tournament, a group of environmentally conscious folks were constructing the Plastiki, a boat made from plastic waste bottles that can sail across the oceans. It was an extraordinary exercise in protest against plastic pollution.
The Plastiki expedition left San Francisco in California on 20th March this year and arrived in Sydney, Australia last Monday 26th July. The Plastiki was inspired by the epic 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage on a raft made from balsa husks. The plastic bottle boat is the very first of its kind. It was a logistic nightmare to build but after several months of figuring things out from an engineering standpoint, the construction was completed for the vessel to sail off.
The message the Plastiki conveys is that waste can be transformed into a valuable resource. Here in Ghana, waste is waste, and rarely transformed into anything edifying. There is some national pretence of recycling plastic waste but that is just a big joke. Ghana’s plastic fingerprint on the earth is not measured and nothing is being done to curtail plastic usage. This matter belongs to a free-for-all regime.
Visit Ghana's beaches and you’ll witness how much garbage, especially plastics, the wise Atlantic Ocean vomits. Nature knows something we humans of today do not know. Nature abhors horrible waste that does not fit into the web of life that is not cyclical, and does not have ‘cradle-to-cradle’ characteristics.
Facts on the global level about plastics are frightening. In the USA, a country that is big on recycling, only 20% of plastic bottles are recycled. Of the 15 billion pounds of plastics produced annually, only one billion pounds are recycled. The excess of 38 billion pounds of plastic bottles and 25 million Styrofoam cups/plates end up in landfills. In the United Kingdom, less than ten percent of plastic is recycled. Figures are not readily available for Ghana but you can guess that a tiny quantity of our plastic waste is recycled.
More facts. It is estimated that up to about 80 percent or more of pollution in the world’s oceans and rivers comprises of plastic waste. This means that human’s plastic debris either floats or settles in water bodies. As if these frightening facts are not enough, scientists estimate that every year, about one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die when they gobble up plastics or entangle themselves in plastic waste.
Since April, whenever I could, I followed the fascinating Plastiki voyage online. One of the fascinating characteristic of the Plastiki expedition was the details of the records. It was constructed from approximately 12,500 plastic waste bottles. It took 120,000 man hours to build. The crew travelled 8,000 nautical miles, which lasted 129 days (specifically, 3,083 hours).
During the Plastiki expedition, the crew read 32 books, drank 1,200 cups of tea, and ate 1,175 chocolate bars (I imagine that some cocoa from Ghana might have featured in the manufacturing of those yummy chocolate bars!). The crew granted 50 interviews while at sea. The Plastiki expedition was reported in over 300 print publications and covered on more than 200 radio broadcasts and 10,000 news websites. 10,400 photographs were taken.
The fundamental philosophy that informed the Plastiki expedition is that it recognized waste as a design flaw because waste does not appear in nature. Waste from one aspect of nature should be a resource for another. This implies that any waste we generate that does not become a resource is unacceptable. The materials we use in everyday living should, as a matter of nature’s necessity, have a life cycle.
An understanding of this philosophy calls for a new way of thinking and acting about the way we live. Clearly, at this point in time of human existence, we don’t have all the answers. There is much room for learning, re-learning, un-learning and re-thinking about waste. Hopefully, the outcome of learning, re-learning, un-learning and rethinking will be a reduction of our human footprints on the world.
The Plastiki adventure story is a perfect message in a bottle. Ghana must have a national conversation about plastics. Some of us contribute nothing to the world. We’re born, we live and we die. But long after our deaths, our plastic waste will hang around, stuck in mother earth and water bodies far into the lifespan of several generations of our confused offspring. This must be unconscionable.
Plastics have not been around long enough so scientists do not know and are not in agreement on how long it takes for non-biodegradable plastics to decompose (i.e. to become one with nature). Some estimate hundreds (500?) of years. Ghana’s average life expectancy is less than 60. Using this estimate, the plastic from which you sucked sachet water yesterday will outlive you by anything from 100 to 450 years. Chew on this.
Ghana needs solutions to the plastic problem. We must rethink combined strategies to reduce, reuse and recycle. The materials we use in the name of civilization which have no life-cycle but choke the earth should be considered scandalous. The youth must wake up and push this country to generate inspiring solutions. We adults are living on borrowed time, dying off with our days seriously numbered. The youth and their descendants will inherit Ghana. But, the reckless will not inherit this earth!
During the journey, the Plastiki crew caught three fishes compared with the crew of the Kon-Tiki expedition forty years ago who ate freshly caught fish every day. Besides, the Kon-Tiki crew could not enter the ocean for fear of sharks. In contrast, the Plastiki crew saw no sharks. Implication? Something is changing or has changed in the oceans’ texture and stock of fishes.
Considering the unknown but definitely excessive quantity of plastics we use in this country and simply toss into the environment, we are creating our own Plastiki of some sort. With all the multi-coloured plastics we are dumping into the finite size of earth called Ghana —in water bodies, in farm lands, being swallowed by fishes, goats, cows and chickens – someday, Ghana would become a Plastiki.
Clearly, there is no political commitment – on both the NDC and NPP fronts. Why? Plastic is big business. People from across our land make good money from plastics. The producers are on the first line of the plastic front with the profit trickling down to wholesalers and retailers.
Plastics have become so fashionable that just about anything one buys, s/he receives multiple layers of single use plastic bags. As a country, we have developed an insatiable hunger for plastics. We use them mindlessly without any pause whatsoever to think about what happens to plastics after they leave our hands. We hunger for more plastics, regardless of its permanent damage to mother earth. Sadly, there is no effort to even promote a reduction in use.
We don’t need a rocket scientist to make it clear to Ghana that there is nothing sustainable about our reckless use of plastics. Without a doubt, our continued uncontrolled use of plastics is irresponsible and disrespectful to our land and waters. We are inadvertently creating our own Ghana Plastiki Company Limited. Damn!
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