A clean race

The latest edition of the Volvo Ocean Race has just begun, with 7 teams competing in this round-the-world spectacular.  One of the themes of this iteration is fighting the pollution caused by plastic.  The oceans are becoming seas of plastic, from fishing nets to microbeads, and the plastic is getting into the food chain.

One of the biggest offenders is the single-use water bottle, a now common item in many households.  All plastics degrade into tiny pellets, which stay in the environment for a long time, decades in some cases.  Although plastic can be re-used in making some products, the majority is simply discarded, ending up in landfills and the ocean.

Fish ingest plastic in the form of microbeads, which become lodged in their tissues.  Often, the fish are eaten by other fish, further up the food chain.  Humans are at the top of the food chain, so the things that creatures down the food chain consume can end up in our bodies.  The huge increase in the numbers of single-use water bottles portends ever-increasing amounts of plastic getting into our bodies.  The sailors of the Volvo Ocean Race encounter plastic in every ocean, all over the world.

Department of Redundancy Department

Saying the same thing over and over again is something I try to avoid, so sometimes I don’t write very much.  But I will revisit certain themes, such as Greed, which is on my mind constantly these days.  The tragedy of the Grenfell Tower in London, a horrific fire which killed dozens of people, brought this to mind, as I was researching the death toll as of several months following the fire.  The police are having to sift through about 15 tons of material on each floor of the 24 story building, looking for human remains, which might be fragments of bone.

Then the puzzle of trying to determine if the remains are part of a body which remains have already been found, or if this is a new individual.  So far, the death toll has not gone up, and some are saying that it might be somewhat less than the ‘about 80’ figure given out shortly after the disaster.  So far, 69 victims have been identified, and 13 remain unaccounted for and missing.  But there were quite possibly people in the building who were not listed as missing, and don’t show up on the tenants lists.

Greed is the reason that those people died, the intentional disregard of safety for the sake of profit.  Added to the insult of the deadly cladding being installed just a year ago is the fact that only one stairwell was usable at the time of the fire, as well as the lack of any central fire alarm.  Greed is destroying people through stress, depression, and insanity.  There is nothing wrong with working, especially when what you do contributes to the well-being of others.

If we insist on trying to live on profits from investments, we suck the energy out of the venture, when reinvestment, better staffing, or paying retirement costs are vitally needed.  Contributing more than just money to something makes that project much more likely to succeed. I am starting to repeat myself, so I will stop.