Henry Abbott

I went to the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis with my family over spring break. During our visit, we participated in Fong Lee and Kevin Yang’s piece entitled “While We’re All Still Here.” The artists invited us to “tie the white strings, symbolic of connectedness, renewal and blessing, to another’s wrist while expressing well wishes.” My mom and I exchanged strings with blessings, and my bracelet has ventured with me around my childhood city, has stuck with me through the Puerto Rican jungle and ocean and still wraps around my wrist in Maine. This inanimate piece of string, not particularly flattering or fancy, means quite a lot to me. It represents a bond with my mother, my family and my hometown. When we humans choose to, we turn pieces of trash into art, mementos for scrapbooks, symbols of love or hate or for someone we’ve lost, and, when playing as kids, we even turn “garbage” into friends.

These objects are meaningless to us until we recognize their value. Consequently, we think little about the majority of the trash we encounter. We love our personal water bottles for the journeys we’ve shared with them and abandon plastic bottles on the beach. We relish a cigarette but mindlessly flick the butt down a storm drain. We purchase prized tote bags from our favorite coffee shops while leaving plastic bags to blow far from our picnics.

Without consideration, pieces of trash feel insignificant. We acknowledge the impact of their sum when we discuss the garbage patch twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, or the rivers of garbage in Guatemala, Indonesia and India. These pollution events dominate the conversation on the consequences of littering and neglecting waste, but, due to their immense scale and often geographically distant consequences, we fail to relate them to our own behavior or understand the potential influence of an individual piece.

Imagine you’re driving down a forest road here in Maine, and the driver of the car in front of you throws a bag full of trash out their window. Witnessing this careless act might upset you, but neither you nor the littering driver will truly grasp the weight of their action. I mean, how could you? How could anyone truly fathom the ten-year journey of a cigarette butt, the 100-year journey of an aluminum can, the 1 million-year journey of a glass bottle or the potentially endless journey of a paper bag. It’s impossible to quantify the repercussions of something that breaks into microscopic pieces that spread everywhere and last forever. So, let’s try and consider a fraction of the possible future of this roadside bag of trash.

The stuffed bag spins through the air as used tissues, plastic packaging and cans fly in all directions until the bag collides with the ground, sending cigarette butts, leftovers and fast food wrapping soaring down the hill. As the half-full plastic bag sits there, surrounded by other pieces of trash, insects and invertebrates hidden in the grasses and soil almost immediately begin investigating and consuming the garbage.

Soon after, a doe and her two fawns stumble upon the trash. The doe sticks her head in the plastic bag. She runs her nose across cigarette butts, a juice box and eventually a few fries, partially wrapped in ripped aluminum foil and paper with a plastic film, which she happily gulps up. The sharp aluminum cuts the inside of her throat and stomach as she tries to ingest it. After feeding on more of the trash and some nearby plants, she and her daughters venture back into the forest, where she dies a few days later. Internal damages from the trash have orphaned her fawns, who now journey alone in the forest.

Later in the day, a gull lands beside the road to investigate the trash. Critters of all different classes of animals have consumed most of the food, but the cigarette butts have caught his eye. Mistaking the cigarette butts for food, the gull takes them back to his nest and feeds them to his hungry chicks. The cigarette butts clog the chicks’ stomachs, and the filters fill them with harmful chemicals. Their corpses can be found on the beach, half buried in the sand a few days later. We can’t be certain whether the chemicals killed them or they starved to death, thinking they were full. Their bodies decompose. The cigarette butts stick around, a few of the 4.5 trillion littered annually.

A few weeks later, the trash—dispersed by animals, wind and rain throughout the forest—is gone from the side of the road. A lone fox glides through the forest and comes upon a pile of plastic in perfect condition, surrounded by a few bones and scraps of flesh where the doe’s carcass used to be. Bacteria, flies, vultures, beetles, mites and moths have consumed the doe and microscopic bits of plastic with her. The fries are gone, but their oily scent stains the littered wrapping. With little of the deer’s meat remaining, the hungry fox swallows whole what cut the doe. The fox moves on, but the wrapping isn’t sitting right. He tries to cough it up. It gets stuck in his throat. He falls to the forest floor no more than 100 feet from the doe. The bodies of the chicks, fox and doe return to the ecosystem. The trash remains.

The aluminum wrapping, cigarette butt and plastic bag continue breaking down—killing animals, escaping bodies, becoming microplastics, poisoning water and soil and making their way into your food, your body and even your child’s brain.

The garbage you leave behind follows you for the rest of your life, leaving a bloody trail in its tracks. So, value the meaningless. Love a string because it represents your family, but don’t forget to acknowledge the consequences of a loose piece of plastic or an empty bottle because, like an equally inanimate weapon, they have the power to kill.