Paradise covered in trash?

We finally got around to taking a honeymoon. We picked St. Croix in the Virgin Islands as our destination, because my wife was impressed with her visit to St. John's and St. Thomas a few years ago.

First of all, if you want to visit Hawaii, but can't afford the flight, then the Virgin Islands is the next best thing! The views were spectacular, as you can see from some photos below...









That being said, one of the disappointments about St. Croix was the amount of trash we saw on the beaches. I understand that the trash that washes up on a beach does not usually come from the local people. However, I think it is important for an island that relies on tourism to have a permanent program in place to keep the beaches clean. In addition, we did not see a very strong recycling program, so I am certain that the locals and tourists are contributing a significant amount to the problem.

Each beach access we stopped at contained a wide variety of garbage that had washed ashore. Plastics, milk jugs and cartons, fishing lines and lures, glass bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, etc. You name it, we saw it.

Since this was our vacation, I wanted to take my "environmental" hat off for the week (yeah right!), but the longer we were there, the more obvious the trash became, and the more we pressured each other into doing something about it.

There was a potential hurricane (Erika) that almost hit while we were there. It ended up being a tropical depression, so we only missed half-a-days worth of activities. Since we were limited on what we could do that day, we decided to go visit Isaac and Jack's Bay, a secluded series of beaches on the southeast side of the island.



We had visited Isaac's Bay earlier in the week (hiking from Point Udall, the easternmost part of the US). We wanted to see the other side, so we approached Jack's Bay from the other road, and found it to be an easier and better marked hiking trail.

As we approached the bay, we again noticed a lot of trash that had washed up onto the beach. First, we just picked up a few items that were obvious (platic doll leg, lighter, plastic bottle), but the more we picked up, the more we saw.

We decided to go full-board and pick up as much trash as we could from the eastern part of Jack's Bay. It took us about an hour, but it was well worth it.

There were some nearby pelicans towards the edge of the bay. If you've seen the video of the albatross and the plastic found in their stomaches on Midway Island, you'll understand our satisfaction when we were done (watch video link below). Basically, the birds eat the plastic, thinking it's food, and it takes up space in their stomach forever, which prevents them from growing strong enough to fly.

We decided to take a picture of what we collected. It was pretty scary what we found in that short amount of time, including hair curlers, motor oil containers, and toothbrushes.




We don't want to single out St. Croix, as there are many beaches around the world with this same problem. What hope this blog can lead to some change in how the beaches are treated by those who live closest to them. Here are some recommendations we would like to recommend...

1) There needs to be a regular beach cleanup on the island. Encourage the tourists to get involved, along with the school children. As you can see, it doesn't take much time to make a big impact

2) Once the beaches are cleaned, start to track and categorize the trash found on subsequent cleanup efforts, to determine where the trash is coming from, so the problem can be minimized.