Jinny Chivers is a Scoop and Scales volunteer and regular customer.  In this shocking yet motivating article she explains why:

 

Why I support Scoop and Scales….

I am an experienced sailor, having spent over a decade living and working on sailing yachts, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean 5 times and around the Pacific Ocean. I have seen the plastic filled beaches and got saddened seeing the huge cargo ships bringing in the “convenience” and “luxury” plastic tat  across the oceans from continent to continent and to remote islands.  There’s  nowhere for the plastic waste to go, certainly no recycling available; often beautiful atolls were trash bins of piles of rubbish. Of course, the average tourist would never see this.

But it was when we actually sailed through the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ that I was completely shocked by its true intensity. It was tragic.  It was not how I imagined it to be with flotsam like you see on the water’s edge, but instead we saw miles and miles of tiny flecks of red, green and blue plastic throughout the water.  It was as deep as the eye could see then regularly scattered by huge floating bits of plastic, I remember one was a 1 metre giant white ball floating. We stopped fishing, the fish we caught made us all sick. We sailed through it for 5 days. It was like the plastic had become at one with the water and was destroying everything living within it.

 

Little changes like choosing where you shop and what you shop for can make a big difference.

 

When I first sailed into St Lucia, Caribbean the sea life was surprisingly sparse. The Island invested in creating marine reserves and controlled the fishing. Within 7 years the coral was back in abundance and turtles were frequently spotted. Sure, it’s not cleaning the entire oceans, but it is all the small steps that will become the big steps in making a big difference to the future.