Thursday 20 January 2011

Rubbish hotel

I've stayed in some rubbish hotels over the years, but this is by far the rubbish-ist.


The beach is supposed to be a place for relaxing, not coming up from the water with another persons knickers on your head.

There is a lot of rubbish in the sea - drinks bottles, carrier bags, clothes, you name it - at some point, somewhere, it will have washed up on a beach.

The Corona "Save the Beach" project has been working to raise awareness of the sate of some of the beaches in Europe and to remind us all that it is our responsibility to look after them.

The project has been building beach garbage hotels all over Europe with one in Rome last year and one now open in Madrid.

Up to 40% of the rubbish the hotels are built out of has been collected from beaches in England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Our oceans now are one big rubbish dump. There is a floating island in the Pacific ocean which stretches from Hawaii to Japan - twice the size of America - which is made up of around 100 million tonnes of plastic (as well as fishing nets and ship loads of shoes which have been illegally dumped off ships), held together by swirling underwater currents. The mass is growing at an alarming rate of ten times per decade.

As well as big pieces of plastic, the island is surrounded by thousands of tiny floating pellets, around 2mm in size which contain chemicals such as DDT. Fish, whales and birds mistake these little shining molecules for tiny fish and zooplankton but they are impossible for them to digest. Not only are the fish eating them, but we are then eating the fish.

It's not good.



It breaks my heart to think that we have done this. We are the only animals who produce waste that nature can't bio-degrade.

It may be too late to do anything about the giant pacific island, but it is never too late to try to slow down these terrible environmental disasters.

We all should look after this world we live in, its the only one we've got. Enjoy the beach, but take your rubbish home and recycle it!

1 comment:

  1. A very good, imformative post! Wow, I had no idea there was such a place of garbage growing in the ocean. That is difficult to swallow, but I am glad to know now.

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