Give a big thanks to Nicole for doing her part to keep a beach in Kuwait clean (and click through to be shocked by the accumulation of garbage – an unbelievable amount of trash for a pretty wealthy country).
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
This really shocked us. We do have garbage here and we do try and keep on top of it, but this needs a government department with a bulldozer. I walked 12kms bare foot on Cable Beach yesterday and only found a broken dog’s ball to pick up, so that improved my day after seeing this. The Lesser Frigatebirds were nice as well! 🙂
Thanks, Corey.
It is always hard for people to believe what is going on here in Kuwait.
When I say, we have trash – yeah, we do too.
We do clean-ups and try to educate – same here.
Only when they see the photos (that only show half the madness), they start to realize HOW bad this is.
I’ve only seen photos from India, I’ve been in Cairo and lived in South Sinai.
If anyone has seen the trash in Cairo, this comes close.
K’s path (the group that organizes these clean-ups) has asked the government ‘arm’ that usually does bulldoze trash and such to work on this stretch of beach. They said ‘yesyes’ but nothing has happened and so we clean it by hand.
But it is only the top Layer we get.
And it’s only one beach of a whole coastline at the time we can do.
Pollution comes from outside (ships that throw trash overboard) and people who just dump construction and household trash and from people that leave their ‘picknicks’.
It’s a Don Quichote fight, but the hope that more and more people fight it with us keeps us going.
K’s path has been in many schools those last few months and that hopefully will help a bit too.
But without more government help this country will be drowning in trash in 10 years.
The company that took ‘our’ trash and recycled what was recyable (what’s the correct word for that?) was bought by another company and they don’t do this any more.
Now ‘our’ garbage goes into the big dump with all the other crap – without recycling.
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@Clare
It’s good to know there are places that are trash free!
A friend recently posted photos from oman – my first reaction was: There is NO freakin’ trash, can’t be the Middle East! 😉
@ Nicole-believe me-we do have trash too and mainly beer cans around town, so maybe lucky you don’t have that to deal with as well! We had some plastic tags washing up and appraoched the pearling industry about them. They agreed they were theirs and then changed their procedures. We were encouraged when we found that they were no longer in Roebuck Bay on our last beach “Clean up”-did find over 60 lost shoes in a 1 km section, though! We are an usual remote town as we do have recycling, but I believe some of it gets shipped to China. There is apparently only one glass recycling place in Australia, but one day they hope to invent something that makes it into a road base. In South Korea they seemed to use old tyres for footpaths and quite comfortable to walk on.
Good Luck with government help 🙂
Oh, we found a whole bag of Carlsberg cans on Um-al Maradin last month 😉
And we have Whiskey bottles aplenty.
At least companies in your part of the Globe try to change things for the better (because they fear the consequences).
That’s quite a lot of shoes. We find those here too, don’t think I’ve ever seen so many discarded shoes as here. Weird!
Only one glass recycling place? wow. I don’t even know how much of anything we have in Germany (too long out of the loop).
I remember something with the tires from Korea now that you mention it.
Thanks, we need all the good wishes we can get.