Alternatives to single-use plastics when sailing

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Single-use plastics continues to be a hot topic with many discussing the environmental impact of this plastic; from plastic bags to plastic straws. In this article, I look at solutions and alteratives to single-use plastics especially when sailing.

Plastics in Our Oceans

After spending several months in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, it was evident that the issue of plastic waste in our oceans is real; and it’s not pretty. It’s estimated that approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans every day. Plastics also consistently make up 60 to 90% of all marine debris studied.

Plastic debris littered the water, beaches and shores, to various degrees, in every place we visited. The more popular and populated the anchorage, the more rubbish there was. We often saw plastic bottles, the remains of plastic bags, balloons, styrofoam and inflatables. There was even a plastic coverall floating in the Atlantic Ocean (alarmingly looking very much like a floating body). In Sicily, I pulled pieces of a partially disintegrated plastic bag from one of the propellers. Bays that looked so pristine from the boat had shores scattered with plastic and other rubbish. It was often a shock. A stunning bay in Solta, Croatia (seen in the photo above), had waste plastic litter on the pebbled shore.

single use plastics — old fishing nets, plastic bottles, plastic things, styrofoam, rusted panels….

The seabed, sadly, also was often littered with rubbish and remnant parts from boats and marinas.

While it may not be too surprising that where there are people, there is rubbish; what is surprising is that on ocean passages, miles from nowhere, we would still see a stream of plastic waste floating by on the currents.

Plastic Waste on A Boat

Seeing plastic discarded in the water and on the beaches made me hyper-aware of the amount of plastic that surrounds any food bought from supermarkets, especially the processed foods. Everything from cheese to prosciutto to UHT milk. In many places in Europe, fresh fruits and vegetables are often placed in plastic bags to be weighed, priced and labelled before checkout. My experience of trying to change that practice was interesting and unsuccessful. I picked fresh vegetable without using a bag to be weighed at checkout, only to have the cashier place the items into a plastic bag before checking them out. Other everyday house hold items such as shampoo, liquid soap, dishwashing and clothes washing liquid containers, are all single use plastic.

When you store your garbage onboard a boat, it becomes apparent how much single-use plastics contributes to this waste.

Encouragingly, many marinas now have recycling and waste separation stations. Sailors in the Mediterrean are actively picking up trash in their anchorages on particular days (“Trash Tuesdays”), and taking it ashore for proper disposal. I tried to do the same at anchorages.

I’ll be honest, during our first cruising season, I wasn’t prepared to minimise plastics onboard. No excuses, but while commissioning our boat, addressing the single use plastic issue didn’t feature in our “to do” list.