By Michael F. Duggan
Why should petty convicts have all the fun?
It became a preoccupation with me a few years before COVID hit: whenever walking—from my car to a store, through the neighborhood, on longer hikes—I would (within reason) pick up any plastic I came across. During my morning and evening commutes, I even began picking up plastic between Washington’s Union Station and my office the better part of a mile away. It soon became a mostly plastics-free route.
Years ago I read about how scientists using a drag net in the Pacific Ocean had turned up seven pounds of dissolved plastics for every pound of plankton. Some commonly-used plastics break down to the molecule fairly quickly, but no further for something like 1,100 years. Whether or not we can see it, it is out there and working its way up the food chain. Some of it has arrived and who knows what the health effects will be as we increasingly ingest foods with plastics in them (autism and some cancers have been linked to chemicals found in plastics). After issues of human overpopulation, carbon generation, and loss of biodiversity/habitat, it is likely the most serious prong of the unfolding environmental crises.
If I am on a routine errand, I will pick up any small plastic I see: bottles and other containers, paper cup tops and straws, plastic six pack rings (always cut the rings before recycling), plastic ropes and cords, and all manner of other molded plastics. Sometimes, when going on longer hikes, I will bring garbage bags with me. A number of years ago, a single 200-yard stretch of the flood plain woods between the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Potomac River yielded two large garbage bags of recent and weathered plastic; I had grown tired of seeing discarded bottles and containers among the profusion of blue cowslip that grows there in the spring and decided to do something about it (an even shorter stretch along the border of a local shopping center yielded a similar haul). Thus began my obsession.
Picking up plastic quickly becomes a matter of pride and you soon come regret not being able to stop your car in traffic on seeing a particularly egregious piece of polymer-based refuse along the roadside. At the height of COVID, I was forced by circumstances to drive to work two or three days per week for ten months. During this period, I stopped a number of times along highways and a parkway to pick up pieces of plastic wreckage after accidents were not sufficiently cleaned up by whatever regulatory authorities are responsible for doing so (these pieces of bumpers and car panels I cut up and put out with my recycling; the guys who picked it up every week probably thought I was running some kind of illegal chop shop in my basement). Stopping on a highway is dangerous, and I probably should not have done this. I urge the proper departments to keep our highways clean (railroad properties alongside the tracks appear to be among the worst-policed places for discarded plastics, so are shopping centers).
If you choose to pick up plastic, please remember that the point is to never be conspicuous, much less righteous about it. Act naturally and as if nobody else was around (unless of course someone thanks you or gives an approving gesture). And make no mistake about it, people will notice you. Along a roadside—and assuming that you are not wearing a fluorescent orange or yellow Department of Corrections vest—you might get an occasional approving honk or a passing thumbs-up out the window. If you are on a trail carrying out a garbage bag full of plastic, people you meet will stop and thank you (people are friendlier on trails and boats). Hopefully your actions will inspire others, but the important part is getting the plastic out of the environment even—and especially—when no one sees you do it. It is an intrinsically good thing to do and its own reward. Just remember that even good things have their risks, and you should always where heavy-duty work gloves when picking up plastic (a pickup stick also comes in handy).
To date, no one has ever made a negative comment to me while I was picking up plastic. But if anybody ever asks why I do it, I will likely say “Because others do not” or “If you and I don’t, who will?” Of course, the short answer is “self-respect.” On a darker note, if good people ask this question, then what hope is there for the planet?
I have no illusions that the few pounds of refuse that I pick up will ever make a dent in the local surfeit of discarded plastics, much less the billions of tons now in the world environment (almost all of the plastic ever made is still in existence). But I believe in the Butterfly Effect, that hurricanes may begin as ripples in a pond. If you like this idea, please start picking up plastics at your convenience; the area of your everyday activity is your world, police it. I also hope that the few people who read this article will share it with others.
Even more disheartening than the small scale of a personal effort is that fact that “recycled” plastics are often sent to other nations who sometimes just dump it. Plastic garbage has turned up in the Marianas Trench, literally the most remote place on the planet. Because of this, we can only hope that the plastic we pull out of the environment does not just end up in a different place.
The United States should implement a world class national and international effort for addressing plastics in the environment. If I was suddenly transformed into the chief executive of this country, I would appoint a “Plastics Czar” whose department would be to approach this problem on a scale similar to the industrial mobilization of the Second World War, and to organize—mobilize—an army of citizens into local chapters who would engage in competitive plastic pickups and related activities.