Patagonia, a Big Plastic Bag
I’m traveling trough Patagonia, Argentina, and exploring how eco-friendly the Patagonians are.
I drove through route 3. It runs across Argentina from north to south, next to the Atlantic coast. Here you can see a beautiful landscape, steppe to one side and deep blue ocean to the other.
Patagonia: it’s a land of dinosaurs, oil and strong winds. The latter is responsible for a horrifying realization–how dirty it is! The last time I visited Patagonia was six years ago, and I didn’t see the mass amount of plastic bags everywhere.
Plastic bags covered everything: on a bush, on shrub branches, and hanging from wires. The bags, huddled together or alone; in colors, white or transparent; big and small. Plastic everywhere. No one picks them up and thus they will be there for thousands of years. That’s because plastic is not biodegradable and so neither the rain nor the wind will completely degrade those plastic bags.
The wind, always so powerful in Patagonia, gathers the bags together and collects them at the side of the road. The traveler has to drive hundreds of kilometers with that view. We couldn’t enjoy the beautiful landscape of Patagonia; plastic bags jumped before our eyes. Before, we used to see guanacos, ñandues, perdices. Now we see plastic.
The worst places are in front of gas stations or the gates of towns. There you can see, literally, fields of plastic bags, dirty, unwrapped, tied to the bushes and choking them.
I asked the people, and nobody knew that plastic could last thousands of years there. They just thought the bags would disappear into the earth after a rain, like paper. But now they see how the they are there year after year, new and old.
I wonder, if I return in a few years to Patagonia, will it be all plastic?
I think this is awful what we do here in America and what they are doin there in Argentina. Look what we are doing to Gods world. He did not make it so that we to literally “trash” it. This is a SHAME.
It has been illegal for many years for markets to use plastic bags in Comodoro Rivadavia. This is the biggest city in all of Patagonia. People must bring their own bags to the stores. However, the REMAINING plastic bags are still windblown in the area!
[...] in Tierra del Fuego’s northern steppe. In the winter they fly from the south, all trough the Patagonia land , to the fields in Buenos Aires [...]