TOSSERS AND JERKS

Thanks to the wonder of the internet I know what they call a person who throws litter out of a car window in the UK. They are called “tossers” and I am continually amazed that people still carry on tossing beer bottles and burning cigarette ends out of cars in South Africa too. Apart from the fundamental stupidity of the action accompanied by the litter and broken glass we also have the risk of bush fires. The prolonged drought (while the rest of the country is experiencing floods) is not helping either.

Over the weekend I was reminded of another type of person we have here. I do not know what they are called in the rest of the world so I have decided to label them “jerks.” I wanted to photograph a cute “penguins crossing the road” sign outside a penguin rehabilitation centre called the South African Marine Rehabilitation and Education Centre in Port Elizabeth. Someone had fired a metal dart similar to a hypodermic syringe needle into the sign using a blow pipe.

Apart from being just a stupid thing to do I am sure that someone like that would think nothing of shooting a dart into a random passing bird or person. The bird would eventually die and the person could lose an eye.

But we have people in South Africa that are even more stupid than this! There are road signs warning of animals crossing the roads all over South Africa. Kudu are especially dangerous at night as the car lights blind them and they try to leap over the car. They tend to hit the car at windscreen height and there are several deaths resulting from this every year.

Amazingly we have gun owners who shoot at these signs and try to hit the drawing of the animal. Obviously these are low intellect people who shouldn’t own firearms and to top it off they are lousy shots as they seldom hit the animal. When they miss the sign they could hit an innocent passer by and I presume that any animal they see is fair game. Maybe something as stupid as this is done when one is drunk?

I really do not like people as stupid as this and I do not know what to say about them except perhaps to use stronger words than tossers and jerks.

Plastic bag use halved - well almost

In May 450 million single-use plastic carrier bags were given out to shoppers . That sounds a lot but its almost half the number given out in May 2006. Last year the Government set retailers belong to the British Retail Consortium the target of a 50% cut in the number of bags, and they have almost delivered on this - missing the target by just 2%. WRAP (http://www.wrap.org.uk) estimates that in 2009, about 5.6 billion bags will be given out in the UK, down from 10.7 billion in 2006. However, there is still a way to go so other measures such as taxing bags (as planned in Wales) and encouraging shoppers to reuse their bags. Participating retailers in the agreement are: Asda, Co-operative Group, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd, Somerfield, Tesco and Waitrose. Morrisons is not a member.

Cutting down on plastic bags has many benefits:

1. Plastic bags are made from oil, so reducing their use reduces the use of oil and electricity in their manufacture and transport
   
2. Plastic bags take hundreds if not thousands of years to decompose, so reductions mean fwer bags end up in landfill or littering our countryside
   
3. Plastic bags can harm wildlife, for example, they get trapped by the plastic, or they may eat it (sperm whales and turtles mistake floating plastic bags as jellyfish), so fewer bags helps wildlife
4. Plastic bags look unsightly when blowing around in the countryside, fewer bags mean less litter.
   

Below is a short piece of footage from Splashdown of a plastic bag floating in the ocean, posing a potential hazard to animals such as sperm whales and turtle, who may mistake them as jellyfish.