In all honesty, I was not looking forward to the trash collection experience on the beach due to several reasons. To begin with, in summer it is even sometimes unhealthy to do an outside activity for a long time, even more if the activity itself requires you to be under the sun for a long time. Additionally, I was not expecting to collect any trash at all on a private beach, because after all, isn’t the hotel in charge of keeping them clean? This wasn’t even an environmental issue, but rather keeping the facade clean to make the hotel more attractive to the public. Overall, I went this Thursday with really low expectations, but as weird as it may sound, I ended up enjoying it!
Many factors played in favor of it, and their combination gave me a new perspective on my role on that beach that day. To begin with, I unexpectedly ended up picking up a lot of trash. Lots of plastic bottles, many more bottle cap; but also several out of the normal items, such as the Hotel Rotana slippers that I found in almost perfect state. Looking for the small items on the sand was not a trivial task. The bottle caps tend to be buried on the sand, and the cigarette butts can many times be just white, which makes it confusing to look for them. However, I ended up finding a lot of them buried in the very beach the people were supposed to enjoy a clean environment. In the grassy areas between the beach and the hotel is where I found the most trash. In here, I was able to find several plastic bottles, a couple of glass bottles, and the slippers.
There were a couple of quite unexpected events during this journey. To begin with, two items that stood out to me were a hand sanitizer half full, and an unopened water bottle. In a way, it was absurd to me how these items could make it to the beach as trash being literally still usable. It made me realize how little do some people actually care, not only about the environment, but about our resources and our state over all. It also made me wonder which train of thought must you follow to just discard something useful/new in the beach like that. Deep down, I just wish it was just that they forgot about it, but that wouldn’t make it better.
Overall, I feel this made me realize how little importance do we actually give to our beaches; and how, even places with economical incentive to be clean, are still with lots of trash. We need in a hurry stricter laws and better initiatives for citizens to help in these efforts.
glad you ended up enjoying the experience. Also, I heard it was not so hot because of the breeze. Your point on cleaning up a private beach is valid, I think this is my fault because I don’t know so many places there. Maybe going to the desert would have been also a good experience, even staying there overnight and see how sustainable we can be. Anyways, probably not something we can do with Covid restrictions 🙁