I'm not sorry!

This is part two of my blogs from Belize, but first I believe I owe you an apology....well sort of.

Reading back over my last few blog posts I realised that they are quite negative, the usual tales of doom and gloom that we all see whenever we watch the news, and for this I'm sorry, or maybe not.

My aim is to present the fantastically beautiful real world images that I've seen, and then contrast these with some sobering truths about the world we actually live in. 

Now some may say that "ignorance is bliss", but is it? 

In the military right from basic training you're taught that ignorance is no excuse, and further more how can we hope to change anything by burying our heads in the sand. 

So with this in mind I retract my apology, and introduce to this weeks blog subject: Nurdles. 

During my stay at the Crooked Tree Lodge I found myself sat at the dinner table with a marine biologist, and a bird watcher who'd been visiting Belize for the past 30 years and published two books on the subject.

The marine biologist was working in Belize City and carrying out some sort of marine survey for the Belizean government. The bird watcher, I think, was there for recreation but had carried out surveys on migratory birds for the government in the past.

The bird watcher painted a grim picture of how the country had changed over the past 30 years. As the towns and cities expanded more jungle had been slashed and burnt, natural habitat was declining and so were bird numbers. 

Yada, yada, yada....we've all heard this before.

It was something that the marine biologist said that really got my attention. 

She started to talk about something called "Nurdles", and she made repeated references to a book called "Plastic Ocean".

Needless to say she was pretty negative about the future prospects for the environment just like my bird watching friend, but what she said about these Nurdles sparked my curiosity.

The definition of Nurdles is small resin pellets used in plastic manufacturing processes. It's also the term used for plastic discarded into the oceans which doesn't biodegrade, instead it photo-degrades with sunlight, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, but they never really disappear. 

So what's the problem with these small plastic pellets floating around in the ocean miles from civilisation I hear you ask?

Well allow me to explain. 

Once these nurdles are out into the environment they stay there for hundreds, even thousands of years. As they pool together into what are called "gyres", they form a rubbish soup. Most toxins in the ocean are hydrophobic and gravitate towards floating debris, in this case this is our Nurdles which tend to float a few feet beneath the surface.

Chemicals like, polychlorinated biphenyls, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and biphenyl A, are churned up with our nurdles which act like minute sponges. 

The chemicals above may all have long and convoluted names but I'm sure you can tell straight away they're not good for you, and you'd be right. They are all linked to changes in behavioural patters, disruption of reproductive cycles, autism, thyroid dysfunction and some forms of cancer. 

Fish and sea birds ingest these nurdles sometimes mistaking them for food. There are reports of fish caught with stomachs full of plastic particles, from the fishes stomachs the toxins held on the Nurdles are readily adsorbed into their blood streams, and served on a plate in your own home who knows what the next stop for these chemicals is. 

During my research for this blog I've found some truly heartbreaking stories of the damage these Nurdles can do. Sea bird mothers mistake Nurdles for food, they feed them to their chicks only to have them die of starvation, their stomachs were full but there is no calorific value in a plastic bead. 

Another thing I've found whilst researching these Nurdles is a host of staggering facts;

There are 6 huge rubbish dumps or gyres in the oceans, and the largest one contains in between 3.5 million to 100 million tonnes of rubbish. 

There are more particles of plastic in the ocean than phytoplankton, for every pound of phytoplankton you could trawl, you'd end up with 6 pounds of plastic.

2 million plastic bottle are used every 5 minutes in the US alone.

A single 1 litre bottle could breakdown into enough small fragments to put one on every mile of every beach in the whole world.

There is no question that plastic pollution is a bad thing, so the only question is what do we do about it?

To me it seems pretty obvious that a problem so huge needs a huge solution, and I'd also say it's about time that the people who made the most money from plastics technologies started to foot the bill.

Western petrochemicals companies have made billions upon billions since the "plastic revolution" of the 1960's, isn't it time that they took some responsibility for the monster they've created? 

What's needed is globally synchronised political pressure from governments on multinationals to effect a change, but since this is after all a global problem then this should be common sense?

"Be the change you wish to see in the world".  M. Ghandi

I believe it's too late for piecemeal gestures, and about time we up'd the ante.

How about this instead?

"Those most accountable must be held to account".