To the Editor:

A traditional spring task of mine is to jog along our rural road — sometimes with my sidekick Petey, the boxer mix — and pick up trash. We once again took this journey a couple of weeks ago and I am always disheartened to see the large amounts of beer cans, soda bottles and other junk, plastics and other trash that are discarded.

This year, I decided that this effort was not really sufficient. So I have gotten the small real-estate company I work for to agree to support my effort to adopt a segment of road in our area. I am in the midst of tackling the bureaucracy to accomplish that.

And, thanks to the pandemic and Zoom, I am taking a wonderfully enlightening course through Bennington College taught by visiting professor Judith Enck on plastics.

The garbage on the roadways is unsightly through my eyes. But it is much more than that. Fifteen millions tons of plastic wind up in our oceans every year and 80 percent of this comes from litter. 

Remember that much of the trash tossed out car windows or that blows out of trash cans winds up in ditches that fill with rainwater during storms that allows the trash to follow the watershed from streams to rivers to the sea. And the trash does not have to travel far to injure local wildlife, domestic animals, or people.

It is a hazard to fish and seabirds and other wildlife that consume and are entangled in this waste. It does not disappear but does break down into tiny particles, much of which winds up in our bodies.

Even the cigarette tossed out the car window contains plastic. Eighty-one percent of samples of tap water have been found to contain microplastics — with two times that amount in bottled water!

Microplastics have even been found in the placenta of unborn babies, as reported by The Guardian on Dec. 22, 2020. The full effects of this are not yet known but it is unlikely that it is good.

Certainly, addressing the issue of the abundance of plastic waste in our environment will take more than each of us properly disposing of our trash (and recycling/reusing it when possible). I hope to learn more about that in my course.

But for now, I hope each of us can “adopt” the strips of roadways near our homes by picking up the garbage and of course, refraining from littering ourselves.

Helene G. Goldberger

Berne