Last Updated on June 3, 2023 by Ellen
No swimming for me in Tulum on Halloween. No treat here. I’ll get in the water with sargassum – no problem. At least the pesky seaweed is natural.
But now there is plastic trash in it, and it’s everywhere. All up and down the strip. North and south. Made me feel sick. It’s like the ocean did get sick. And she vomited some bad stuff in her stomach onto the beach.
God only knows where this plastic trash washed in from. Much of it is starting to break down into smaller pieces. A lot of what I saw was styrofoam. White chunks stuck in the sargassum are plastic, foam or dead coral.
Some locals are blaming other countries – such as Colombia and Venezuela. Tulum has its own trash problem, that is generally in the jungle areas most tourists do not see. I doubt the Mexicans are going to dump trash into the sea that supports the local economy.
I have half a mind to contact a marine biologist or oceanographer in the States and see if they can track the recent current to see where this plastic originated. But, that’s not even possible, is it? Really – who cares where it came from? The ocean is full of plastic and garbage because humans are filthy creatures who keep using plastic for their own ease and comfort.
The good life. Right? The easy, comfortable life. The cheap life.
More like a cheap, greedy lie that leads to a toxic life with no easy answer to change humanity’s habits.
I’m guilty, too. I looked though these pictures before writing this while munching on a sliced orange bell pepper, which I had stored in a plastic sandwich bag in the fridge. It’s so much a part of my consumerism culture I didn’t even think about it, until I did think about it.
How’s your bottled water taste? Your packaged snack? The trick or treat candy wrapped in plastic, stuffed in a plastic pumpkin bowl? Is that bottle of soda, or diet soda going down easy? Taste good?
Like my last post when the ocean threw up on Tulum’s beaches, I moved nothing for any of these photos. I did, however, enhance color on some of them to better see the waste we humans should be ashamed of.
Last time, the stuff appeared after rain that was virtually non-stop for days. This time, we had a few thunderstorms, but not like the rain earlier in October. It was very windy this time – even in town a couple miles from the beach.
Saturday was a holiday so I didn’t see workers out cleaning the beach. I’m sure there were some workers somewhere, I just didn’t see them. Not sure what will happen on Sunday. But I am sure of this – high season is right around the corner so the beaches will get cleaned.
And then, only those small little plastic bits will be left – like little toxic shells.
It’s out of control and so very sad. Walked this morning down the beaches beneath the Tulum ruins . The amount of plastic and trash was outrageous.
We looked at the trash and found plastic bottles from Jamaica and Costa Rica .
It’s turtle birthing season , no way these little guys can make it through all this trash to the Ocean .
I did see a cleaning crew yesterday on about 30 people but they were working further north where the tourist are
Wow, we are so saddened to hear this. It was really bad in 2015 and 2016 when we were last there. I can only imagine how much worse it is now. Thanks for updating us – even though it’s bad news.