They are horrible, Kotatsu. You did not post them for no reason so what is the background to that?
Well, basically I was just sent the link by a birdwatching mailinglist I'm on, and was horrified; I basically got the same basic information before opening the link as I gave here.
It reminds me of going to Japan, where every beach is covered with litter of the same kinds: bottle caps, cigarette lighters, old shoes and so on. My Japanese guides were adamant in claiming that the litter had invariably come across the sea from Korea, Russia and China, despite the bottles being almost invariably Japanese brands, and the fact that we were in Sendai, on the Pacific coast. In the meantime, most things you buy in Japan is wrapped in at least one layers of plastic, but
very commonly two layers. I ate a lot of chocolate while in Japan, and there were usually a layer around the whole box, and then one inside, and then individual wrappings.
It also reminds me of a friend Holger, who's a member of Greenpeace, who did some "undercover research" on a large Norwegian fishing vessel going between Bergen and Iceland for half a year. He told me that the fishers brought bagfuls of food and stuff on board, all in original (plastic) wrappings, and when these things were used, they were simply thrown overboard. Holger worked as a chef on this ship, and he decided to do something about it, and instead stored all the scrap plastic and wrappings underneath his bunk bed, and for a normal trip, this was a substantial amount.
A few years ago, it was very popular here to have large bins by the exits of supermarkets, where you could dispose plastic (and paper) wrappings before going home, but they seem to have disappeared entirely. Why? I have no idea. Similarly, I was brought up never to throw any kind of trash on the street (apart from apple cores and similar things) and instead put it in my pocket, and throw it in the bin when I got home, but no one under 20 seems to do that anymore. Why is that?
Sweden is a very dirty country, where there's trash everywhere, basically. If you visit Gothenburg on a Saturday morning, and walk down the main streets, you'd think there had been a revolution every week. There's glass shards, plastic, paper, vomit and all kinds of crap in a thick layer all over. My hometown, Jönköping, has a quite long beach, and the Commune got so fed up with how people treated it every summer that they stopped cleaning it. They usually filled about one normal-sized dumpster per day, all through the summer, only with things that had
not been placed in bins but just left next to picnic places and so on. They were planning to go on garbage-picking strike for a week, to send a signal, but after two days they were forced to go back to work, because there was nowhere to sit on the entire beach.
I guess I have no point, apart from putting words to my dislike for plastic wrappings. It seems to me that the more people talk about environmental issues, the less people care.
