Don’t you ever want to know what happens after – say, you’ve thrown away the black plastic bag – the one given to you as a carrier bag for the 50 pesewa bread you bought yesterday? Oh, the bread itself was packaged in a whitish plastic bag in the first place before the whole thing was repackaged in the black plastic! I am curious. I want to know. I so desperately want to track the life cycle of all the light-weight harmless-looking little plastic bags gifted to me for just about every little thing I buy. Out of good old politeness, no matter how well plastic-clothed the things I buy, I am shown more respect. And the respect translates into – more plastics. Many times I have begged for less plastic but the sellers look at me and as if they secretly wonder: “Who is this strange little woman who cannot accept respect showered on her?” I am disturbed because I do not know what happens to the innocent-looking tough little creatures after I have used them and mindlessly ushered them into the universe, into the bottomless abyss. Well, the truth is: I don’t really use the plastics; they just cross my path! And I instantly dispose of them as soon as I pull out the contents I need and to which the plastic was a mere accompaniment. The plastics are therefore only pretty and convenient add-ons. Since I don’t really need the many plastic wrappings, I let them go. So – they’re with me one moment and gone the next. But gone where? That’s what I want to know. Don’t you also want to know? I think we should all desperately desire to know where the plastics go after they have crossed our paths. I am so sure that if we knew, we would be concerned about plastics. My research tells me that plastics do not really go away. They leave our hands alright, but then, they just stay put. They are so tough that they can only stay put. They don’t melt away. Well, even when they melt, they only take on another form. Melting converts them into – yes, you guess right – tougher, hideous, constipated plastic. Most plastics are non-degradable. What that means is that they take hundreds of years to breakdown. Scientists don’t yet know how long plastics take to become one with nature because plastics have not been around for that long. And to think that so many of those virgin polythene cross our paths everyday, if all they do is to stay put, then their volume must be increasing, and will eventually choke the centre of the earth, Ghana. Talk about super solid waste! After we release plastics into the universe, some get fortunate to receive jolly rides by the wind and get carried away to other locations; as if those locations don’t already have enough plastics of their own. You don’t share your food with people but you inadvertently share your plastic trash! So the plastics I release today from that loaf of bread might fly away on the wings of the kind wind to another suburb of Accra, or to Obosomase, Akropong, Oppong Valley and Kikam or farther afield. I wish I could put a tag on my next plastic trash and have its journey down into eternity tracked, long after I am gone. How dare me leave behind, such constipated rubbish on earth to survive me! Well, some of the plastics move on from gutter to gutter, as if they were young boys tossing football for fun. At times they get stuck in gutter funk to clog our drainage systems which cause floods, homelessness, misery and deaths. I guess plastics don’t like it when they get stuck in gutters. Who does? While in the gutter, some get yucky lucky and are washed away into waterways. While enjoying their time in waterways, they take on the character of floaters. They bloat up with pride, chest out, belly full, with a clear preference to stay on top of filthy ponds. They also like to burp. Belly-full always calls for bold burping. Considering our propensity for super-Christian pretentiousness that drives us to pray at the most secular of functions while we precariously mix the sacred with the profane, my guess is that our burping plastics that float on filthy ponds might be gleefully exclaiming: “Sweet Jesus! Hale-Hale-Luuuuyah!” Plastics are long-suffering. They are travellers. Some swim into the ocean, in grand style. Have you seen our beaches lately? I visited the village of my childhood recently. It is one of the sleepy villages on the Ada coastline – Ocansey Kope. It has been literally on life support since, well …… since Abraham was a school boy. I was so shocked to see the once pristine beaches of yesteryears entangled with the creatures. It was colourful; and it was filthy! The mighty Atlantic Ocean had vomited out some plastics. It is as if it was telling my town-folks: “This material is foreign to me and I refuse to digest it!” The irony is that it is the same Atlantic Ocean which ferried millions of our kith and kin across as slaves to the white man’s land to be beaten, maimed, raped and killed as they built the white man’s civilization while ours remains stuck in development limbo. That ocean is now puking out plastics. Does that bother you? But although the great Atlantic vomits some plastics like in the Noah-and-the-whale bible story, some tempt the fishes. Oh, those pretty little fishes! They are tricked; thinking the multi-coloured bubbly things now ever-present in their territory is food. Once they catch the bait, the fishes get choked and die. I am sure they suffer really painful stomach ache and nausea, and suffocate while they breathe their last. So the fishes which our fishermen should catch for our market women to sell for us to buy and cook and eat to stay healthy, alive and thrive are experiencing premature deaths. Na who cause am? Plastics! Our domestic animals are not exempt from this cruel fate. Cats and dogs are being deceived too. The plastic monster is getting them down, low. Does it bother you that the family cat that quietly goes about its business could just pop dead from choking on plastic? Well, if you don’t care much about cats and dogs, just wait till your goat, sheep, cow or that sweet little child swallows plastic and chokes and….. Some plastics make it into fields and farms, interlocking the earth in the company of the roots of cassava, yam, plantain and maize and succeed in stopping them cold in their tracks. The last days of this “blowman” is spent in perpetual entanglement. Plastics have the tendency to mangle together as if in a dance to their favourite high-life music. After all, it takes more than one to tango. While in that scintillating dance posture of a lifetime and in what appears to be perfect communion with the universe, they stay locked up in fun and in filth, interlocking the earth – into eternity. Our descendants, yet unborn, will come to meet our plastics. Don’t you wonder what the plastics you throw away today will look like 20, 77, 195 and 423 years from now? What monstrosity! Perhaps they would grow wings and fly away to the red planet, Mars. Not!

Source: Dr. Doris Yaa Dartey (dorisdartey@yahoo.com)