The Bin
We’re in Central Asia. New experiences are flooding in, unfamiliar landscapes surround us, cultural assumptions are being challenged, flora and fauna are simultaneously familiar and exotic.
We have reached a pass at about 3,400m (that’s around 11,155 ft in old/Boris money). For a bit of context, Ben Nevis is 1,345 m (4,413 ft), Mont Blanc is 4,807 m (15,770 ft) and Everest is 8,849 m (a tad over 29,000 ft). We’re in a minibus in T shirts and trainers, by the way, not on foot in full climbing gear. We’ve just passed that herd of yak.
We stop for a toilet break and photos. It has the potential to be a memorable moment. And it is: for Terroir, at least, this turns out to be the most memorable and, sadly, the most shocking view of the whole trip.
No - not the toilet block (men on the left and women on the right - it’s in Kyrgyz, not Russian).
The issue is the awful, ghastly, horrendous abomination of plastic litter, accumulating so unexpectedly in this vast landscape. It hit us hard, straight between the eyes and sent us reeling.
This isn’t Kyrgyzstan’s fault. This is the fault of the whole world.
This blog is not about Central Asia. It’s about the environment, global responsibility, and to some extend, international tourism. Specifically it’s a desperate plea regarding the misuse and abuse of so-called single use plastics.
Single use plastic is any plastic item which is designed to be thrown away. Even if it’s technically recyclable, it’s still far more likely to be thrown away, as demonstrated in the pictures above.
Single use plastic isn’t just bottles - it can be plastic shopping bags (again, see pictures) labels and tags, drinking straws, takeaway containers, packaging and cutlery.
Despite what we are led to believe, single use plastic DOES NOT biodegrade but merely breaks down into micro particles, too small to see. But its still there, polluting land, rivers, sea - and our food.
Plastics which aren’t recycled get burnt or dumped, polluting water, air, land - and our food.
And inevitably, the pollution caused by single-use plastics’ impacts disproportionately on poorer and disadvantaged communities.
But:
We can take action
.
The immediate and short term solution, suggested by our picture above, is to take your litter home and dispose of it responsibily!
This Kyrgyz litter bin (right) is trying hard too, although one wonders how much of the plastic deposited here can actually be recycled.
Better and more long term solutions include:
political pressure - write to your MP, join a pressure group, sign petitions
find alternatives to single use plastics - use zero waste shops, avoid that chippy with polystyrene containers, buy drinks in cans, take a cloth bag when shopping
wear natural fabrics or go to a charity shop for recycled clothes
if you can afford it, boycott items in plastic packaging; change the mindset of manufacturers and suppliers
It’s not simple - it never is - but that is a very bad reason for doing nothing.
Please take action now. Not everyone will have been brought up short by the experience we had in Central Asia. Plastic pollution is usually invisible and insidous, impacting on every corner of the globe. We musn’t ignore it.
Our thanks to Greenpeace, amongst others, for some hard, cold reality to temper the rather emotional response to the Kyryzstan high level bin. https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/14052/everything-you-should-know-about-single-use-plastic/