The Garbage On Our Oceans

Let me break my own rule for this one post only – the rule about only blogging about positive things and about things I like. Here is something, that I am really not very fond of but deserves attention. Garbage.

Nothing relaxes me like walking along long deserted beaches. No matter what the country or what time of the year, I can spend hours just walking along the water, thinking. I prefer to be alone as it gives me as much space for myself as possible. Naturally almost the first thing I did when I arrived at my hotel in Okinawa earlier this month was to take a long walk along the beach, this time with my camera. It was a long, gorgeous beach, fronted by expensive hotels as far as I could see. It was also pretty clean, I guess the hotels spend quite a lot of money keeping the beaches spotless, for the sake of guests. But I couldn’t help noticing the garbage washed up on the beach. Naturally, I was disturbed by this and started picking it up, but I didn’t bring any bags and so I was quickly overwhelmed by all the bottles and plastic debris.

Where is all this garbage coming from? Of the thousands of bottles I saw, I guess about 90% had Chinese, Taiwanese and South Korean text and labels. There were a few Japanese and U.S. bottles as well, but not nearly enough as the South Korean and Chinese stuff. My friends suggested that it might be tourists from these countries littering the beaches of Okinawa but I can hardly imagine a visitor coming all the way to a remote Okinawan beach just to drop of their entire collection of plastic bottles! So I guess this is all washed up from garbage thrown into the ocean, and the only stuff that makes it this far is bottles and other floating stuff. Which leaves us with the disturbing notion that there are thousands of South Korean and Chinese fishermen just chucking whatever they have on board into the ocean? Can this really be the case? I have never been on a fishing vessel in those countries, but who can really be so ignorant as to just throw their garbage overboard without thinking about it?

We need to start talking seriously about what we dump in the ocean, not just high profile cases like BP, but even from individual fising vessels! If this is the stuff that makes it this far, I wonder about all the garbage we can’t see, the garbage that get’s stuck on the ocean floor or in the stomach of marine life!

One of these things though definitely originated in Japan, the poor guy who dropped this cell phone on the beach can’t have been to happy about it! Of course I picked this one up for proper recycling, a cell phone contains hundreds of poisonous chemicals and heavy metals. The weird thing though, when I removed the SIM card and memory card, both of them were absolutely eroded and covered in crusty sea salt, but after a bit of cleaning up they worked fine in my own cell phone! So what was in the 2 giga byte memory card? Well, the same thing that most Japanese young men fill up their memory cards with, roughly 2000 photos of a dog!

Here’s a list of all the garbage in the photos and the country of origin:

1. Glass bottle, South Korean origin.
2. Fishing tool, unknown origin. There were hundreds of these!
3. Soft drink plastic bottle, Chinese or Taiwanese origin.
4. Plastic liquid container, Chinese origin.
5. Mineral water bottle, South Korean origin.
6. Anti-Freeze liquid plastic container, German origin, unknown use, maybe U.S. Armed Forces.
7. Red Bull drink bottle, Chinese origin.
8. Cluster of water bottles, mostly South Korean origin.
9. Shampoo bottle, probably Chinese origin.
10. Cell phone (Sony Ericsson), Japanese origin.