Waves of Plastic
A Zero Garbage Week in Costa Rica
I decided to create as little garbage as possible for a week abroad as a challenge to see what a traveller could do to minimize their impact, specifically regarding waste related to food consumption.
Living in Costa Rica as a family is lovely, peaceful, even magical. Each day’s work involves feeding ourselves from local markets, grocery stores and street vendors, bearing witness to extraordinary biodiversity and luxuriating in balmy waves. Being far away from home serves up a range of everyday differences; some of which excite and reward, like ordering unknown food in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Spanish. Often the world’s diversity challenges us to examine our values, a true gift of the travel experience. Here, our daily habits shift and our relationship to our environment — what we eat, what we notice, what we accomplish — shifts too.
The global plastic scourge is present even in idyllic Costa Rica, a country with bountiful nature, happy people and progressive environmental policies. By looking deeply at the food we eat here, what I end up seeing most is the plastic. Packaging in the stores, turning into trash on the streets and in the ditches, the rivers, the oceans. Over 400 tons of it generated each day in this country, pitched after one use and present in the ecosystem forever (Living Circular, 2018).
I brought along a few key items that helped to refuse bags, cutlery, cups and straws: My ‘travel food kit’ includes a set of bamboo cutlery including a straw, a re-useable beeswax wrapper, a re-useable camping plate/bowl, nylon shopping bags and an insulated water bottle (good for cold water and tea, too). These items come in handy for reducing some of the plastic associated with eating and drinking while moving about, provided they are packed and accessible.
There are always delicious-looking eats from vendors on the streets and on the beaches offering a diversity of packaging dilemmas to navigate. My favourites waste and taste-wise (coincidence?) were the ubiquitous ‘pipa fria’: cold coconuts, machete sliced in front of you and straw inserted (“No pajella por favor”), and a tangy vegan mango ceviche salad in a small durable container that I returned each time to the happy vendor for reuse.
We did our best to buy and enjoy a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, buying them from the backs of trucks, street stalls, pop-up markets and in the grocery stores. This was the best food: scrumptious, fresh, healthy, alive, naked, always available and deeply satisfying. Peels, cores, pits, shells, stems, husks, leaves, skins, seeds and rotten bits circle into soil, a zero-plastic life cycle. Finding well run composts was not easy as proper infrastructure was patchy. When unavailable, I employed age-old guerilla tactics to find places for appropriate burial of avocado, mango, papaya, beet, coconut, banana, tomato, guava, lettuce, watermelon and pineapple leftovers.
Staying in places with kitchens and cooking in them prevented the need for excess in the take-out materials department. We ate beans and rice, potatoes and eggs, nachos and sandwiches, quesadillas and curries, salads and sausages. We sought out recycling systems and employed them, hoping against all probability that milk cartons, peanut butter containers, cardboard cereal boxes and glass pesto bottles will actually get turned into something else and not swirled into the garbage universe. Unfortunately even with our grocery aisle vigilance, planet-saver-on-the-go kit, compost quests and recycling optimism, there are just so many items our family lives on that are packaged industrially in single use plastic. Refusing to buy them would mean no cheese, breads, meats, crackers, chips, pasta, cereal, rice or popsicles. No popsicles? Not possible.
Which brings me to the crux of my challenge: Who is responsible for the plastics catastrophe? Is it us, the consumers making choices every day? Or the street vendors? The grocery store owners or managers? I contend that it is none of these people. Proper waste management can’t rely on virtuous citizens or small businesses to deal properly with an inherently unsustainable product. Nor can it rest on the shoulders of local governments to set up expensive and ultimately ineffective recycling pick-up, drop-off, sort and bail and send facilities. The responsibility for this global disaster lies with the plastics producers and manufacturers, and the governments that let them proceed with business as usual.
What will save us, the sea turtles, the oceans, the albatross, will be a coalition of governments with the political will to pass and enforce strict regulations on what can be made and what, most certainly, cannot ever be manufactured, distributed, sold, and thrown ‘away’, ever again. Such a movement is afoot, a coalition building and gathering momentum as citizens demand better and governments and businesses jump on board. The shift away from plastics as we experience them today towards a world of innovative alternatives is possible. Unfortunately, mirroring ongoing tobacco and climate justice narratives, deep-pocketed industry lobbyists stand in the way.
‘Big Plastics’, an affiliation of petrochemical companies, plastics manufacturers and industry associations have been silently spending big money for decades to maintain the dominance of plastics on the planet. In fact, it was this consortium that pushed for recycling as the ‘solution’ to the plastics problem 40 years ago. By convincing us to save the planet through recycling, and putting the onus on municipalities to figure out how, plastics manufacturers were allowed to proceed in covering the entire earth in garbage (Root, 2019). In contrast to aluminum, which can be recycled again and again forever without any loss in quality (75% of the aluminum ever mined in the U.S. is still in use today) (Micu, 2019), it is becoming increasingly clear that plastic recycling never did and never will work. 91% of plastics aren’t recycled because of problems with cost, complexity, quality and volume (Franklin-Wallis, 2019). Whether in Canada, Costa Rica, or Cameroon, the only way for this to change is a complete system rethink.
In the ‘New Plastics Economy’ only three classes of products may exist: those that can be composted, cycling forever through soil and air and water, those that can be innovatively reused and those that are easily and infinitely recyclable. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation launched the campaign through ‘The Global Commitment’ in 2018, which aims to ‘accelerate the transition toward a circular economy’. It counts 400 signatories, including the biggest food companies in the world: Nestle, Coca Cola, Pepsico, Mars, Danone and more, representing 20% of all plastics production (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2019). Along with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, other groups such as #breakfreefromplastic and The Plastic Pollution Coalition have sprung up, galvanizing lawsuits and supporting bold legislation.
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As I head to the beach, bamboo straw packed in anticipation of a delightfully plastic-free ‘pipa fria’, I’m cautiously optimistic that the world is waking up, and standing up for better ways of living. Here, Costa Rica is working to reduce both carbon output and plastic pollution. President Carlos Alvorado announced a few years ago that the country would be carbon neutral by 2021 (Irfan, 2018). That plan shifted recently, as the target date approached with no chance of being met. It now vows to produce no more carbon than it offsets by a much more realistic 2050. In a similar pronouncement and walk-back, the country was to ban all single-use plastics by the same target year, but recently the initiative was watered down in the legislative assembly to include mainly straws (AFP & The Tico Times, 2019). Still, this is an important step. I saw thousands of straws in Costa Rica, only a small fraction of which were paper or bamboo.
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Taking this time to carefully consider our food here in Coast Rica served up some serendipity along the way. In a shared hostel-style kitchen, we met people with food related passions and swapped stories. A strict raw-food couple from Russia described the benefits of living food on the health and well-being of themselves and their family, and shared some of their tasty gazpacho. A young trail runner and fruitivore from Philadelphia shared his zeal for obscure tropical fruits, distributing soursop, canary melon, jackfruit, and cherimoya. The Ticos (local Costa Ricans) made us lots of hearty Gallo Pinto (rice and beans).
More than ever I found myself practicing mindful eating this week. This evening we cut up a fresh mango. I observed it. I picked up a cube between my fingers and smelled it. I slowly placed it on my tongue and let the incredibly sweet taste dissolve in my mouth. I carefully bit and separated the cube, gently chewing and pulping as small pieces disappeared over the course of a few minutes. The memories of the taste could last forever. The peel and pit will turn to soil. A different ending than that of the plastic bag I declined at the market.
Sources:
All photos by Simon Hocking other than those indicated otherwise
Living Circular Online (May 3, 2018). Will Costa Rica be the world’s first plastic free country?. Retrieved from: https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/industry/will-costa-rica-be-worlds-first-plastic-free-country
Root, T. (May 16, 2019). Inside the Long War to Protect Plastic. Retrieved from: https://publicintegrity.org/environment/pollution/pushing-plastic/inside-the-long-war-to-protect-plastic/
Micu, A. (July 17, 2019). Everything about Aluminum: facts, recycling, importance. Retrieved from: https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/recycled-metal-aluminium-882342/
Franklin-Wallis, O. (Aug 17, 2019). ‘Plastic Recycling is a myth’: what really happens to your rubbish. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-recycling-myth-what-really-happens-your-rubbish
Coca Cola European Partners (Sept. 9, 2014). Pledge, Play & Recycle! Coca-Cola Enterprises and Tesco launch joint campaign to encourage customers in GB to recycle more. Image retrieved from: https://www.cokecce.com/news-and-events/news/pledge-play-recycle-coca-cola-enterprises-and-tesco-launch-joint-campaign-to-encourage-customers-in-gb-to-recycle-more
Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2019). New Plastics Economy: We launched a Global Commitment to address plastic waste and pollution at its source. Retrieved from: https://www.newplasticseconomy.org/
Irfan, U. (July 17, 2018). Costa Rica has an ambitous new climate policy — but no, it not banning fossil fuels. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/17/17568190/costa-rica-renewable-energy-fossil-fuels-transportation
AFP & The Tico Times (Nov. 1, 2019). Costa Rica passes watered-down anti-plastics law. Retrieved from: https://ticotimes.net/2019/11/01/costa-rica-passes-watered-down-anti-plastics-law
