The Scourge of the Plastic Bottle

The Kenyan coastline is beautiful. Aquarmarine waters, with bright white waves breaking onto a white sandy beach, lined with cassuarina and palm trees. There’s quite a bit of seaweed, parts of the beach seeming more prone to it than others. In places where coves face a certain direction, mounds of seaweed can stand several feet deep. That’s all very natural, though not particularly pleasant to walk through. However, what I’ve been noticing this holiday is the amount of rubbish that’s been mixed in with it – shoes (quite an abundance of shoes!), toothbrushes, and plastic bottles and bottle caps. The bottle caps can look quite colourful (red, blues and greens) amongst the brown weed, but it’s rubbish and shouldn’t be here at all, detracting hugely from the beauty of the rest of the beach. It’s made me think about the number of plastic bottles that must be being used each day, and discarded, either just tossed out, or disposed of via Kenya’s seemingly  ineffectual rubbish collection system. (Ineffectual, as a lot of it is evidently finding its way into the ocean, and in other places, trees are adorned with plastic bags.) How many meetings, conferences and hotels give out 500ml bottles, rather than using water filters which draw water from the taps, and reusable containers. There must be a better way of doing this before this country disappears under a mound of plastic.