It’s New Year’s Day. An arbitrary day in many respects, because numerous dates in numerous cultures designate the beginning of another Earth orbit around the Sun. Yet there’s something inspiring about January 1. The day offers a chance to recalibrate and reassess, to hope and plan. A particular New Year I recall is 2022. We are holidaying as usual aboard our small yacht and anchored at D’Urville Island. We row ashore to find an accessible landing place in an inflatable dinghy. We offload a waterproof backpack filled with intentions for a New Year’s morning cuppa with a Christmas mince pie.
D’Urville Island is a kind of dividing line between Marlborough Sounds and Tasman Bay/Te Tai-o-Aorere , the latter forming a grin-shaped coast on which Nelson sits on the bottom curve of the smile.
We note that the prevailing winds and remoteness of Wharariki Bay, in Greville Harbour, combine to make it a repository for non-natural debris: mostly lightweight, waterborne plastic.
We didn’t intend to do a rubbish clean-up. Coloured shards of blue, red, green and UV-tarnished white are noticeable among the mound of wave-smoothed sticks and branches. It is hard for us to get stable footholds in the mountains of twigs strewn at the spring tide mark, to fossick out the alien plastic.
Commercial debris – short ends of rope and massive orange and black buoys – forms a core of the plastic pollution we collect. It finds company with a Colgate toothbrush, three plastic straws, a Bluebird chippie packet and a vast assortment of plastic pieces mimicking dismembered limbs from various one-time-use containers.
My husband and I sit on D’Urville’s stony, twiggy beach. As we sip our cups of tea, we lift our gaze to survey the glorious bush-clad bays and milky green sea. We then ferry back to our yacht a sackful of plastic detritus: unable to bring on board the entire collection of once “useful” products that are now cast aside.
If I have a dream (to echo the words of a famous social justice figure), one wish, one intention for this year, it is that plastic not be produced whenever and wherever possible. By the end of 2024, it is anticipated that New Zealand will have joined about 190 United Nations countries to finalise negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty, tackling “the plastic problem”. I pray that every beach-loving Kiwi will endorse and help implement this remarkable document.
For the treaty to really have an impact, though, manufacturers and marketers – not just UN negotiators and the tail-end consumer – will need to take responsibility for eliminating unnecessary plastic.
A Cornish business I visited pre-Covid makes traditional (compostable) rope for the fishing industry and children’s playgrounds. It reminds me that New Zealand, too, once made and exported twine and rope from harakeke fibres.
Perhaps something as simple as a child’s swing made of natural fibre, or cardboard-packaged shampoo, will exemplify a healthier planetary future.
When I was growing up, ice creams like my favourite Toff Bar, a cousin to the Choc Bar, used to come wrapped in paper.There wasn’t a need to greenwash consumers with marketing tales of “downcycled” plastic fence posts – which eventually end up as plastic particulate pollution.
A New Year has the potential to engender optimism and is typically a time to recommit to our values and aspirations. May it offer you a time for reflection and formulating plastic-free intentions that each of us can make good on in coming months.
Maybe then, I won’t need to take ashore a rubbish sack with a thermos for my beachside New Year’s Day cuppa.
Megan Blakie petitioned the Christchurch City Council in 2016 to ban single-use plastic bags. She is a member of the Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance.
