LESSONS LEARNED WHILE CRUISING Jamie & Behan Gifford Trash Talk


Dealing with Garbage On Board


Picture this: you are anchored in


the lagoon at Makemo Island, a 30 mile long atoll in the Tuamotu islands of French Polynesia. Around you the clarity of sea and sky is so pure that there is no discernable horizon, just shades of blue. Onboard, a half dozen island kids want to touch and try everything – computer, guitar, kayak, food. You want to share, and to glean bits of culture from people whose story is so vastly different. This is living the dream.


Then, as if in a slow motion, you


watch as one of the kids gobbles the last bite of a snack bar and pitches the plastic wrapper into the lagoon. In response to our cry of “no!” the boy smiles and shrugs, as if to say- it doesn’t matter. A large school of purple and grey unicorn fish next to Totem doesn’t mind either, the shiny plastic now committed to their domain for generations of unicorn fish to come. The irony is that we would never throw plastic into the ocean. Yet we’ve created far more waste than the simple lifestyle of this Makemo resident ever will. This fun, happy, sad moment onboard Totem has gotten us thinking about garbage. Fundamentally, if it didn’t come


out of the ocean, it shouldn’t go into the ocean. Everyday garbage on board such as food containers and packaging, food scraps, etc., are easy to properly dispose of shoreside in the US, Canada, and much of Mexico. Even so, it’s a good practice to manage the gross factor. Split garbage bags, bad smells, and bugs can quickly become nasty when facilities are inconvenient to take out the trash. We’ve learned to make a habit of rinsing food remains from


48° NORTH, AUGUST 2010 PAGE 38


containers that may become stinky or alive with bugs and crushing containers when possible. Still, we have


had occasion to dispose of garbage in more traditional and less agreeable ways: dumping or burning. On a long ocean passage or stint in a remote area, we simply cannot carry the volume of trash or want to attract bugs. Empty glass and metal containers are effectively inert in the ocean, so when required, we sink them. This is done by filling the container with seawater and then discarding it overboard in deep water. Onboard Totem, we call this making fish houses. If we accumulate too much paper waste we resort to burning it; often when there is a beach bonfire going anyway. Food scraps go into a bucket in the galley. When the bucket is full, we wait for an outgoing tide so that the items that don’t sink or break down quickly, such as citrus rinds, don’t end up on a nearby shore. The last and most problematic trash


Landing amid garbage washed up on the beach.


Second, soft plastics are stuffed into a waste container with a dowel. You can fit a lot of plastic wrappers into a plastic bottle. Capping that bottle prevents attracting bugs. Better still at dealing with plastic


type is plastic. Even during our longest stretches away from waste facilities, we have not dumped or burned plastic. Instead, we use two simple methods to reduce the volume and mess factor to a manageable amount until we can dispose of them on shore. First, hard plastics are cleaned of any food remnants and then cut up to become two-dimensional and space efficient.


waste is simply to have less of it onboard. Some of it is easy to eliminate, specifically by cutting out single use plastics. For example, we bring our own canvas or nylon bags to get provisions. Doing so eliminates dealing with plastic grocery bag waste once back at the boat. Also, we use stainless steel water bottles instead of buying bottled water. They’re plenty dinged up from use, but don’t create garbage and they don’t leach nasty chemicals into water. We’ve seen countless kinds of plastic garbage in, on and near the water; plastic bags and bottles are by far the most common items. Fishing gear is probably the next most common plastic beach debris. Of course there are many more


kinds of waste that come from a boat: bilge water, soapy water and cleaners that get washed down the drain; dead batteries, engine oil and filters, human waste, and the list goes on. It would be


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