Paradise in the Keys but… sitting down to our first meal in the Florida Keys with great anticipation of some fresh caught delicacy and there IT was, brought in and casually placed down on the table in front of us. Shocked, I let out an audible gasp and then Rick said “What the?”. As it turns out it was not to be our first sighting in the Keys. Like Boom Boxes and the Scrunchie we thought it had been on the way to becoming an urban myth.
There it was staring us in the face, a Styrofoam™ (styrene) cup with a lid for my three-year old’s water. Really? My heart ached as we saw the repugnant receptacles over and over again, more foam then I have seen in the past 10 years! In restaurants, coffee houses, ice cream shops, and people carrying left overs, the white yeti reared its head. Holistic and green purveyor, I carry the mindset as well as gear with us on our travels. Travel water bottle, reusable shopping bag, reusable travel snack baggies, and of stainless steel travel silverware have come on walkabout and used daily thus sparing countless plastic in the forms of bags, bottles, extra packaging for snacks as well as spoons, forks, and sporks.“Green Enlightened”, once you become enlightened to this waste and damage to the earth or for those who think that is hokey – selfishly think of all the toxins you are ingesting from this one and done lethal crap, plastic included. Ask for our coffee in ceramic cups to stay when you can (it tastes much better anyway) and selflessly, to spare the earth of course, suffer through an ice cream cone instead of a cup. There are some necessary evils in travel, a paper cup now and again for espresso, they decompose, but Styrofoam is an unacceptable instant noxious shock . Did you ever drink a hot drink out of one? Yes, the hot melted plastic tasting caffeine rush is just ungodly venomous.
This is a horror to me that my child or any child would consume something from this container, let alone the environmental impacts of the remnants of this vile substance. It takes over 500 YEARS to decompose! I could have easily taken a hundred of photos. Hauntingly, not just in the places that used these products but also on beaches, parks, and sidewalks. Most frightening is that I found pieces broken up on beaches and parks. This material is notorious for breaking up into pieces that choke animals and clog their digestive systems. Blanco Tóxico easily blows into the water and then floats! Blessing that there are so many Wildlife Refuges and Rescues but, get to the source.
What the hell Miami and the Keys? We crisscross the continent and the globe and never, in recent years, seen such an outbreak. Many cities have downright outlawed it, even Taiwan for goodness sakes! White hairs does not need to = white products.
****The EPA and International Agency for Research on Cancer have determined styrene as a possible human carcinogen and the National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research found 57 chemical by-products released during the creation of Styrofoam.
Living Wherever We Are 