November 2016 on the Great Barrier Reef
Just Sayin’
Captain Trevor Jackson
It’s on a different day for all of us, but the process is repeated all-round the country, in every suburb, every day. My day is Thursday…around 0700 you hear him coming, the big steel arm reaching down and one by one grabbing the big green bins and hurling their contents into the back of the big steel muncher truck. Up the street like clockwork, taking away the crap we don’t want.
A thought occurred to me the other day, if the truck didn’t come each week, and we had to live with our rubbish, pile it up in the yard forever, would we do things differently? I mean he just comes automatically and it’s all whisked away and is no longer our problem. What if it stayed our problem?
Now this wasn’t just some random thought. A trip or two back our water chiller machine had some small problem and broke down for a day or two. To solve this and to remain proactive I decided to fly in bottled water so that the guests on board weren’t forced to chug from their bathroom taps. As it turned out the water machine was fixed before the bottles arrived so I had bottles stacked up all over the wheelhouse, wondering what to do with them. It seemed kid of ridiculous actually, water falling from the sky, coming out the taps, surrounding us all the time, yet here I was, stepping around these stupid bottles and even if I did get rid of them, they had to go somewhere, be someone’s problem, they weren’t going to just disappear. I flew them in because it was convenient, now they were suddenly quite…inconvenient…and I was forced to consider just how much pollution we are creating in the quest for simply making life easy.
My kids chug through 2 litres of milk per day. That’s 365 of those plastic 2 litre milk bottles every year. From just one house! If I could go somewhere and pour milk from a bowser like petrol I would. But there are many ways to reduce our consumption of plastics and recycling goes a long way toward reducing the creation of new plastics. There are many companies working toward using marine debris, ghost nets and recycled plastics in clothing, shoes and everyday items…..just sayin’.
