Not a day trip, overnight or expedition is concluded without some recognition that our waterways are the conduit for which an unbelievable amount of the “throw away society’s” discard travels, then collects itself. Winter paddling trips provide the most glaring view of this. This annual low water season combined with frozen banks and bottomlands enable us to get out and explore places that are normally mud sucking morasses. Thursday’s short journey to the bottom end of Maple Island provided just such an example. At three different locations along the three mile stretch, large rafts of driftwood, pushed above the bank during this past year’s flooding, resembled nothing less than a land fill. Above all, the plastic bottles, barrels and bags revealed an eyesore of epic proportions.
Jon Bowermaster, one of the world’s foremost explorers, recognized this same phenomenon recently in Antarctica, believe it or not, on an island where penguins, seals and birds are the only inhabitants. In a follow up post, he notes the shocking truth about plastic bags.
In the U.S. alone, more than 100 billion cheap plastic bags are distributed every year, bags which never really go away, many of which end up in our waterways. Less than one percent are recycled.
1 % of 100 billion annually! That means 99 billion bags are not being recycled. Outrageous! Jon then shares his personal resolution to “go cold turkey” on plastic as much as he possibly can, beginning with a commitment to carry his cloth shopping bags on all shopping trips. Certainly, this is something that we can all integrate into our own stewardship plan. Big Muddy Adventures certainly is, and moreover, we are taking this a step further by carrying and filling large trash bags (albeit plastic ones) with the plastic we find on all of our trips.
