I am currently building a collection of reusable shopping bags, courtesy of my local supermarket. The bags are said to have a shelf life of about 200 uses, but I wouldn’t know, because every time I go to the store, I forget to bring one of the dozens I have stored in the cabinet below my sink, and have to pay 100 colones each for new bags to add to my growing hoard. But it’s a start. One small step against the flowing tide of plastic, plastic everywhere.
It’s even the law now. Specifically, the Law to Combat Plastic Pollution and Protect the Environment. Officially, Law 9786, and it has been in effect since April. No more straws, no more plastic bags– except (and this is a big except) those not used to transport goods to their final destination. Which covers everything else in the store that uses plastic, from bottles to the rolls of clear plastic bags used in the vegetable and fruit area to bag your potatoes and bananas, to the plastic garbage bags packaged inside another plastic bag.
In truth, it is inescapable. Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian known as the Father of Plastics, likely did not foresee a future where his non-biodegradable invention would be so widespread that microscopic particles of it appear in places unimaginable– the sea, soil, food, drinking water, in human and animal tissue, including stools, the lungs, the bloodstream, placentas, and breast milk. Like some sci-fi creature able to split itself into infinitesimal forms and invade every nook that makes up the fabric of civilization, even our bodies, plastic is everywhere.
When I first came to live in Costa Rica, I liked to joke that plastic was a genuine Tico growth industry. Ferreterias, tiendas, pulperias, supermercados all had the same routine with any purchase: wrap it up, tape it shut, stick it inside a plastic bag and tie that famous tight double knot that requires the patience of a Zen Buddhist to untie without giving up and just ripping the whole thing open. I would buy a few simple items and end up with a bucket of plastic crap.
There were sporadic attempts to get recycling programs going, and there are to this day. You may see garbage cans neatly labeled ‘Lata’, “Papel’, ‘Plastico’, etc, outside stores and in public areas. But peek inside each and you will see that some make the attempt to put their plastics and other garbage in the correct can, while others are apparently illiterate.
A long time ago, I was living on a quinta in a rural area and had conscientiously separated all of my refuse into several sacks. The owner of the quinta came by and saw the sacks outside. She had her peon cart them to the back edge of the property–where there was a giant square hole. I watched as he dumped my sacks into the hole and buried them all.
What happens here is a microcosm of what goes on in the world. When you consider microplastics, the great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the fact that the world produces more than 380 million tons of plastic every year, you may feel like Captain Ahab battling Moby Dick, but instead of a whale, the object of your ire is a mountain of plastic that towers over you, grows by the hour and is hopeless to oppose. In the meantime, those reusable cloth bags have replaced the plastic bags in my kitchen cabinet. It’s a start, I suppose.
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Don Mateo
