Pebble Dash & Pick. Wednesday 25th September 2024
The new normal autumn is upon us and with it the Pebble Dash takes on a more heroic looking and slippery character. Not cold enough yet to turn rain into needles – that won’t come until March most likely with the rapid changes in our climate’s energy system – but wet enough to feel like a poor imitation of action film training montage, soggy protagonist battling the elements in a low tech training environment. The wooden groynes are greasy as I steeplechase over them, trying not to manifest the countless athletic fails I’ve absorbed via YouTube.
The summer is gone and I can see the chlorophyll has left the foliage, tinging the leaves that flow out through the rain water in the rains as discharge outfall from the wooded wetlands of Bulverhythe and Combe Valley watershed and on to the beach. They outline the strand line this morning, a wiggling path for me to follow east toward the pier, making me think about the carbon and water cycle from land to sea.
But I don’t need to bend for the leaves. Matter for the lug worms, not for my bag. I have a loose filter for what goes in my pebble dash treasure/rubbish bag – currently an old Royal Mail sack. I leave anything that the earth can easily reclaim. The weasel word “easily” is my own and I interpret it myself. This could include drink cans as metal rusts and returns to the elements quite quickly and inert but often I grab them up because although aluminium does no obvious harm and is tremendously abundant on this earth the embodied energy in each crumpled Tyski or energy drink should be honoured. Where was the ore deposit from whence it came? Who designed and operated the machines that extracted it? Who rolled out this sheet of aluminium? How much energy did all this take? How is that all covered by £1.29 in our local corner shop? What are the economics of that? Where is the value? What are the externalities of this whole process? From the slag heaps of the mining to the realities of the Sri Lanka or Bangladeshi person in the shop that, I imagine, is mainly kept open by the proceeds of cheap liquid intoxicant products in aluminium cans.
If it can be reused or recycled by man it should be. And they should be collected also because in my early morning logic when they litter the beach in great number – and they do seem to flock together – they are the broken windows that encourage more gaudy litter baubles, decorative expressions celebrating of our wasteful ways to the beach.
All that before 0700, on the trot, between bags of dogshit, mayonnaise pots and sweet wrappers. Bend, swoop, squat, run. Total time 43min approx.
Todays trash bingo was not achieved although I did collect two obviously useful items in a child’s Primark basics sweater (looks like top half of UK prison issue trackies) and full unopened spray bottle of Cillit Bang. The sweater will be washed and donated to an actual person I know rather than donated, which is dumping deferred in my book. See the videos of the fast fashion choked beaches in Ghana, the dumping ground for “dead white mans clothes” ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3kuuBPVys&pp=ygUXZ2hhbmEgZmFzdCBmYXNoaW9uIGR1bXA%3D). This is transnational fly tipping masquerading as altruism. The whole process economics underpinned by cheap nature and cheap labour baring the true whole costs. Plastic – for that is what polyester is – needs to be at least honoured for the function it was created, if not rationed for what we really need it for; medical implements, essential hygienic applications etc. Single or limited use consumer items of this kind is beyond daft at this point in human’s history.
It needs to be removed from environments where it can randomly harm the biosphere – harm us. This includes the sweater, kids sun hat, random shoes and underwear abundant on the beach.
The vapes – I’ll think on this another day. Work beckons. I’ll let the thought about the origins and footprint of the lithium and miraculous processes embodied in the neat neon lozenge of the blackcurrant cotton candy flavoured Hayati Pro™️ glow dimly in the back of my brain like the LED battery indicator on the side…