It’s 7.30 am and I’m standing in the breakfast room of my hotel in Memphis. After 21 hours of travelling, I’m in need of something to eat and drink, but as I look around, I can’t find a glass into which to pour my orange juice. Eventually, I settle for one of the plastic cups stacked beside the juice dispenser. Next, I have a yoghurt, eaten with a plastic spoon because I can’t find any metal ones. For my eggs and toast, there’s only a plastic plate, and I spread butter and eat with plastic cutlery because, again, that’s all there is.
As I eat, I watch as my fellow guests finish their own breakfasts and dump all of the plastic they have used in the course of having their meal into the same bin. There’s no attempt to separate paper from plastic, or food waste from plastic, or anything from plastic. It all goes into the same enormous, capacious bin, lined, you guessed it, with black plastic.
It’s my first visit to the USA, and my first glimpse of the love affair that the American nation has with single-use plastic. That’s not an entirely fair statement because, of course, I don’t know what many of the States do with their waste plastic. But over the next two and a half weeks, I’ll travel through several States, beginning in Tennessee, on my way to Louisiana, stopping to visit small towns, Civil War sites, museums, historic houses and cities enroute, and throughout that journey I will see the consumption of single-use plastic on a scale that appals me.
In Memphis, most of the bars that line the famous Beale Street serve their drinks in plastic cups. Vast banks of them cover the bar tops, and each time an order is placed the server reaches for a fresh one. Every cocktail or soft drink comes with a plastic drinking straw. What happens to it all once the customer has left, I do not see. What I do know is that, throughout my trip, I won’t spot a single recycling bin, even though I’m looking out for one.
On my riverboat cruise down the Lower Mississippi, I learn that the river level, for the third consecutive year, is at a record low, caused by a combination of warm temperatures and lack of rainfall. As a result, barges and ships risk running aground, and there are concerns about harmful saltwater intrusion in southern Louisiana, which is wreaking havoc in fragile wildlife habitats. Evidence of mankind’s attempts to tame, subdue and engineer the ever-shifting, meandering Mississippi is everywhere.
As I travel downstream towards New Orleans, the weather increasingly dominates TV news broadcasts. Hurricane Helene is rapidly approaching the area, its advance monitored in minute and exacting detail. Its possible causes, not so much.
Luckily for me, it misses the Lower Mississippi completely. The residents of Florida and North Carolina are not so fortunate. Homes, roads, bridges and vehicles are swept away by the floodwaters; the death toll is over 230. Across the south-east United States, lives are devastated by weather.
Watching, I think of the numerous petrol stations lining the roads in and around Memphis, selling fuel at just over $2 a gallon. Of the bafflement that I’ve been met with throughout the trip for choosing a vegetarian diet. Of those towers of plastic cups and bins bulging with waste . . .
In New Orleans, there’s no towel rail in the bathroom of my hotel room. I fling my damp towels over the shower rail to dry each morning, only to find they’ve been removed and replaced by fresh ones every day.
In the food hall of a glossy air-conditioned shopping mall, cleaners push refuse carts piled high with plastic sacks crammed with packaging from takeaway food, every order wrapped and bagged as if it’s being taken home when it’s only moving to the nearest table before being consumed.
At the Historic New Orleans Collection Museum, I finally find a serious attempt being made to discuss the climate crisis. The displays are informative and honest about the damage being done by the USA’s addiction to over-consumption in all its many guises – and there is only one other visitor in the gallery. It is, the guide tells me apologetically, a sensitive topic in these parts, and one most people are unwilling to contemplate, far less act upon.
“Oh, but China . . .!” climate crisis deniers often cry, when challenged to change their unsustainable habits. But the stark truth is that the US is both the world’s largest generator of plastic waste, and one of the world’s worst at recycling and reusing. In 2016, it threw away 42 million metric tons of plastic, according to National Geographic.
In 2020, the Public Interest Network published a report which found that US homes and businesses throw out enough plastic to fill a football stadium one and a half times every day on average, and that figure is increasing. Only 8% of this plastic is recycled.
I leave the States with a jumble of images and confused, half-formed thoughts in my head. The disconnect between the grief and suffering of the many human tragedies caused by deadly weather events and the total absence of any sense of responsibility for contributing to climate change is bewildering.
I find the merest glimmer of hope in President Biden’s 2022 call for federal agencies to take action to reduce and phase out single-use plastic products “to the maximum extent practicable”.
And then, in a Bonfire Night act which will have explosive consequences, the Americans elect Donald Trump to be their next President.
Angela Gilchrist
After a long career as a journalist and editor in the magazine publishing industry, I’m enjoying life as a freelance writer, part-time tour guide, book festival committee member and volunteer tree warden. I live in North-east Fife with my husband, two cats and a Highland pony.