Rubbish Raft

This is F hijacking Tigger's blog again because as he pointed out yesterday he doesn't get to go swimming.  It's getting steadily hotter here so after cycling this morning (an activity that might have to go on hold again soon) it seemed a good idea to go across the road for a swim. (It is a public holiday in Greece today.)

From our balcony you can't see right into the inner corner of the inlet.  So it was with great disappointment that I arrived down there to discover the floating raft of rubbish that Tigger and I had spotted at sea on that day of strong wind (and which had miraculously disappeared yesterday), had reformed, regrouped, and arranged itself in the corner where I usually launch into my swim. 

The main body of the raft appeared to be completely dismembered expanded polystyrene - nurdles I believe they are now called - probably millions of them.  And bobbing about in this gently billowing surface scum were dozens of plastic bottles, tennis balls, and various other miscellany of discarded plastic.  It covered an area about 10m x 20m - so probably not enormous but way to big for me to scoop off the water by hand.

I swam around it.

I felt guilty.

I swam back, clambered up the shore, went home and dragged the paddleboard out for its first season outing, grabbed an empty 70litre compost bag, quickly made a make-shift muslin net (which proved to be completely useless) and headed back.  

Strange things rubbish rafts, by the time I had returned it had not come ashore as I had expected it to (it had been within a metre of doing so) but had begun to disperse again and was spreading itself over 150m or so a bit further out in the inlet.  It was no longer a collected 'raft' but a sort of strand line at sea.

The point of all this rabbiting on is not that I collected rubbish at sea, but that of the 70 litre bag full that I did collect, most was rubbish you couldn't see on the surface of the raft.  The raft had in fact formed on top of a dense collection of semi-floating/floating-submerged, film plastics: plastic bags, cellophane wrappers, chip packets.  And by rough estimate 95% or more of the rubbish collected represented food and drink consumed 'on the move' - or smoking.  Masses of it was cellophane wrappers off silly things that don't need wrapping - like plastic straws, cigarette packets, individual sweets and tiny packets for individually wrapped biscuits.  There were 2 or 3 dozen bottles and cans, and plastic cups (and their lids) for the whole of Athens, but the most difficult to see/collect and identify were clear plastic film bags, and pieces of bags that had clearly washed about in the sea for a very long time.

Shoes, tennis balls, some aerosol cans, and a lone shampoo bottle made up the 5% or so 'other'.  

The good news is that apart from that one shampoo bottle (and possibly the aerosols but they were rusted), I would not have called any of this rubbish household waste.  So it would tend to suggest that rubbish is not being thrown into the sea, but blown into the sea;having been dropped by people too busy to sit down to eat/drink/smoke and too rushed to look for a rubbish bin to put their waste wrappers in.

And that last observation surprises me, because I had developed the impression that Greek culture placed great value on  'the meal' - eating together, taking time over food.  (Coffee is another subject and Local-Kiwi-Alien gave us excellent insight into that one earlier this week. So I will just link her, you don't need my views.)

Anyway, nurdles aside (I need to get a good fine nylon net), I might have got half of what was available to get.  Having climbed back up the rocks with the deflated paddleboard and 70 litres of wet plastics, I looked back to realize that looking down from that height I could clearly see the quantity and extent of the uncollected stuff.  That had been more than too much sun exposure for me already so it is a task for another day - or rubbish to pick off a shoreline somewhere nearby.  To be fair it has never been this bad in the 18 months we have lived here so maybe we just experienced an unusual combination of wind-directions that brought it all together in this place at this time.

And my question is: are there organizations we can join to campaign for (1) an end to completely pointless packaging, or (2) to make those packaging their products in this way pay for cleanup and disposal, (a sort of polluter-pays scheme), or (3) to encourage someone to invent properly organic packaging that contributes to rather than detracting from the environments it finds itself in at the end of its useful life (which for most of these was an incredibly short, one-trip useful life)?

Deflated

Directing

PS: I've just realized there is also another type of question in this post - what was there to feel personally guilty about?  And what cultural conditioning contributed to that?  (I grew up with Tidy Kiwi campaigns.)