THERE IS ALWAYS BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS

 

 On  January 9 the BBC reported on the plastic nurdle crisis , as a spill  lashed the Iberian coast with  the force of a thousand pool noodles 

"More than 1,000 sacks of pellets  known as nurdles ... have fallen from the Liberian flagged freighter Toconao, some 50 miles west of VigoThe tiny plastic balls used to make water bottles ... are less than 5mm wide, making cleaning up extremely difficult. Volunteers… combing through sand and sieving water to find the plastic pellets... accused Spain's Socialist-led national government of failing to inform local authorities. The crisis is reminiscent of Spain's worst ever… "

While the BBC valiantly strove to persuade viewers that  pellets EU approved for food container  must be as bad as a crude oil spill, an article entitled 

The water footprint of tourism in Spain

in the flagship journal of plastic bottle & spork  studies :

Tourism Management 

 

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REVEALED THE NURDLE TSUNAMI CONTAINED LESS PLASTIC THAN THE WATER BOTTLES  SPANISH TOURISTS DISCARD IN  DAY. 

Now comes word of an intelligent spin-off from well publicized  but largely unsuccessful efforts to find and recover plastic trash on the high seas. It has long been noted that rivers run down to the sea, and that the flotsam  chucked into them often outweighs the jetsam jettisoned by coastal vessels plying the seas into which they flow. How much more?

Here's a days catch by a modestly sized but cleverly located boom  in the delta of one of the many tropical rivers that drain the hinterlands of the Spanish Main:  1,421,000 kg of plastic bottles, enough to yield a thousand tonnes of recycled nurdles and assure the sustainability of the tourist water bottle ecosystem for generations to come.

A solution to the more difficult  problem of Central America being a lee shore downwind of all the thirsty tourists in the Caribbean  remains to be discovered.