It’s interesting, the questions people ask on finding out you’re a marine biologist. Recently I’ve noticed a theme: what people (in the UK anyway) want to know is what do I think about all the sewage going into the sea? Now I’m as prone as anyone to taking the ‘actually it’s a bit more complicated than you may have heard’ stance on many issues, but here I am pretty happy to stick with a simple ‘yep, it’s pretty bad isn’t it?’
Of course, it is a bit more complicated than this - for instance, my local river, the Don, is far cleaner now than it was 50 years ago when it was “…grossly polluted and fishless throughout almost its entire catchment”. And for a few weeks back in the late 1990s I worked on a campaign to try to stop South West Water from polluting the coast around Portsmouth with raw sewage. So none of this is new, but, due no doubt to recent coverage of the low performance and high profits of the privatised water companies, this is certainly an issue that has ‘cut through’.
However. The other morning in a taxi to the station to catch an early train, when my driver raised this, what he was specifically disgusted about was ‘nappies and condoms and sanitary towels on the beaches’. Now I’m not about to leap to the defence of the water companies, but - those kinds of things should be nowhere near the sewage system. They should be going in the bin, not down the loo. And if they are flushed away, that’s on us. Time to take some responsibility.
[Naturally I didn’t actually say any of this to the cabbie. He was quite a forceful personality, it was 6.30am, and I’m English - I settled for an ambiguous tut.]
I have a similar feeling when I see headlines like this one in The Guardian yesterday: “Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution”. I mean yes, these firms are producing the plastic. But we’re consuming it. To be fair - the article itself does touch on this tension between individual and corporate responsibility. But even if these multinationals follow through on their pledges to switch to recycled plastic or bioplastics or some other material - all of these have environmental impacts, sometimes really significant ones. Ultimately: as long as we keep buying shit, they’ll keep selling it.