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After the tragic Dec. 7 oil spill on the West Sea, Styrofoam is still a major problem at Padori Beach in the Taean Haean National Park. |
 By Rick Ruffin
PADORI BEACH, Taean ― What I saw wasn't so much a beach covered in oil. It was a beach covered in garbage, mostly Styrofoam and plastic.
Rick Wakeman, who organized the bus that took a dozen of us to the town of Padori, advised us all to ``work for an hour and then take a break," to give our lungs a chance to recover from the foul air. In reality, I hardly wore my mask.
I noticed there were several hundred people scrubbing oil off of rocks. I asked a woman about the mountains of Styrofoam: ``Oh. We don't clean that," she said. So I got to work.
I started digging in the dunes behind the high water line. I immediately uncovered a mound of plastic bottles and Styrofoam fishing floats a meter deep. It had been collecting for so long that it was completely covered by thick thorn bushes growing along the beachhead.
After a couple of hours, I had handled hundreds of plastic water bottles, and built a mountain of Styrofoam fishing floats.
I found plastic water bottles, plastic and Styrofoam fishing net floats, nylon fishing line, nylon rope, rubber sandals, shoes, aluminum cans, tin cans, fuel canisters, nets, glass bottles, foam pads, black vinyl bags, etc, etc. But 90 percent of the garbage was plastic and Styrofoam.
The oil spill of December 7 has been billed as the greatest environmental disaster to ever hit Korea. That depends on who one talks to.
Nial Moores, director of Birds Korea, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting birds and their habitat, will tell you that the Saemangeum reclamation project (40,000 hectares of rich tidal flats ruined) is the biggest environmental disaster ever to hit Korea.
Others argue that it's the plastics industry ― the daily production of thousands of tons of vinyl, PVC, polystyrene, nylon, and polypropylene to name a few. When you burn polymers they release all sorts of bad things into the air. One of them is dioxin, a highly toxic substance.
Dioxins are carcinogens and endocrine disrupters, also called ``gender benders" for their ability to cause animals to be born with both male and female sexual organs. Here in Korea, people burn plastic all the time.
The fishing line, the ropes and the abandoned nets that I collected tangle and drown millions of sea mammals and seabirds every year. Loose nets can drown humans, too.
Plastic bags, which look like jellyfish, are eaten by sea turtles. When the bags become lodged in the digestive tracts of the turtles, they become fatally constipated and die.
There is a place in the Pacific Ocean called the North Pacific Gyre. It is where the world's garbage ends up, circulating lazily under a blistering tropical sun. This patch of floating debris consisting of Styrofoam, plastic bottles and other junk, is about the size of Texas.
We must use less of these plastics, do a better job of recycling them, or ban outright their manufacture and sale. The world's oceans are literally drowning in a wave of human made Styrofoam and plastics.
And every bit of plastic here today will still be here 100,000 years into the future. That's a lot of plastic, and there is more being made everyday.
From the perspective of crisis management, cleanups like this sometimes cause more problems than they solve. Every person involved in this cleanup was issued disposable cotton or rubber gloves, a disposable mask, as well as a disposable suit.
There are tens of thousands of people involved in this cleanup. That creates a lot of waste. The author spent considerable time collecting empty water bottles and Styrofoam containers that had been used to feed the workers from the day before. This oil cleanup, while removing some of the oil from the ecosystem, is creating a huge pile of waste.
This is not supposed to be about boosting business for vendors of Styrofoam packaging, disposable suits, gloves and face masks. This is supposed to make the beach cleaner.
We are moving into a period in history in which we will be beset by environmental crises of all sorts. The Taean oil spill is just the beginning, the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so to speak.
How we respond to this crisis speaks volumes for our ability to manage future situations. Sometimes humans create more problems than we come to solve.
Sometimes the best way for nature to heal is to leave her alone. That seems to be one thing we are unwilling to do.
The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com.
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