What Happens if the Beach Turns into Plastic?
Beaches in El Salvador have a pretty good reputation for being trashy. Certainly 20 years ago, beach-goers routinely tossed their trash into the water or left anything that was not going home right there on the sand. After any holiday, The warm black sand was literally covered with paper napkins, styrofoam plates, plastic forks, straws, plastic bags, and all kinds of picnic garbage. Roaming dogs ate the food scraps. Stuff worth selling was picked up by scrappers and recyclers. And people relied on the waves to wash the bulk of the trash out to sea. And while trashing the beach while at the beach was bad enough, tossing stuff out of bus windows, sweeping home trash into the streets, tossing rural trash into water ways was simply what Salvadorans did. The challenge was real, and still is: small country, big population, an abundance of trash. Over the last 20 years, environmental education combined with infrastructure improvements have made a big difference in the level of tra