Beach Cleaning in Livingston

Livingston, Guatemala. Tropic climate, Carribean flair, long sandy beaches.. but.

But every single bit of the beach is covered in plastic trash. The municipal authorities have it cleaned twice a year (before Christmas and Easter), but in the time in between it just piles up. 

Our job as volunteers is to pick up at least a tiny fraction of it. Equipped with shovel, rake, and a wheelbarrow, we set out to make the place a little bit cleaner. We start on the part of the beach in front of Chris' house, who is our host now and invites beach cleaner around for roughly two weeks per month.

Plastic trash in all colours and shapes.

We work 4 hours a day, seven days a week. Since Chris had some other volunteers over recently, the sand looks actually not half bad right in front of his property, so we work in a slowly expanding radius around this starting point.

Wheelbarrow is full, back to the base to empty it.

Chris' idea is to raise awareness, mostly among the local population. (It might sound a bit patronizing, but the argument "Wealthy tourists like to come to clean beaches to spend lot of money there." is a very valid and well-accepted one.) Also, he just enjoys not stepping into small piles of plastic when he jogs down the beach.

Since he is about to turn his house into a Spanish school, he's already got some connections to the local school teachers as well. So maybe this project will grow even bigger, and pop up in the local curiculum in the future?
We keep our fingers crossed, hope for the best, and pick up some plastic flip-flops and soda bottles in the meanwhile.

We are satisfied with these few meters of beach for now.

Where does the trash go, after we've picked it up? So far, there isn't a very satisfactory solution here, but Chris makes us collect it all in a corner of the property that has been designated "landfill". From here, at least it won't be flushed back into ocean, and there is the hope that it can be compacted enough to use it as the foundation of a road leading towards town. (So far, you can only transport heavy stuff with a boat to this spot.)

Tropical paradise with a nasty edge to it.

We pick up trash at a rate of about 2 to 3 wheelbarrow fillings per hour, which means that by the end of the week, we should be at around 50 to 80 loads.

If you consider that Chris had volunteers coming for a bit over half a year, two weeks per month, I would estimate that here are now nearly 1000 wheelbarrows full of trash in this place. It's not pretty.

In the middle of the improvised landfill, a brave little banana tree tries to hide this pile of garbage

Why is the beach of Livingston full of trash? 

The immediate answer is "it comes from the sea." The currents or the winds are unfortunate for the town, and washes all those little pieces onto the land here. 

Where does it all come from? 

About one third of the trash looks really weathered, some of the plastic bottles are full of small seashells, so they must have been in the ocean for a long time. So they could be heading in from practically anywhere in the world. There is a lot of research on that topic, and some great efforts to "clean up"..

The rest of the trash are bottle caps, plastic cuttlery, fragments of styrofoam plates and cups, and similar trash that is very likely of "local" origin (Guatemala City counts here as well, it is a quite a few hundred kilometers away from here, but one the rivers flowing through it ends in the ocean close to here...)

Guatemala's public waste collection and disposal service is atrocious (at best). Also, the awareness of the problem seems to be low. People are still used to throw away their garbage just whereever they are, which worked perfectly for wooden spoons, banana leaves for plates, and a society that had only biodegradable materials in use. 

However, plastic has invaded, and is now permeating every corner and village of the country. Those blasted little white plastic forks are everywhere, every little street vendor serves her or his delicious goods on those cursed plastic plates, and even the tiniest shop is stocked with a fresh supply of more of that shit. And most of the time it is not possible to find a trash bin within the next few kilometers..

In a way, our one-week-job is very rewarding. After every single hour, we see before us a new patch of sandy beach that miraculously looks.. nice.

On the other hand, it is frustrating. After a small storm hit the beach at night, we set out in the morning, and saw the first pieces of plastic crawling back into all the areas that we had previously cleaned. I'm glad I don't have to do this more than one week in a row, and think that it's a good way to have fresh, motivated volunteers after a short time.

However, it is a very interesting experience.. and it definitely strengthed me in my resolve to try to avoid all needless plastic. That means I will try to avoid products that are fabricated from plastic but could actually be made from something else (and would then probably even look prettier) or products that are unnecessary packed in plastic (and this will be the hard part).