✨ UNFORGETTABLE TRIP ✨ WEEK #199✨The Beach Trip That Changed me.

It Was Supposed to Be Just Another Summer Day

The plan of the trip was simple: sit near the sea at a place called Toukra east of Benghazi, do nothing productive, and let the afternoon pass the way beach afternoons are supposed to.

note: photo generated by Chatgpt.

But somewhere between laying out the towel and actually sitting down on it, I noticed the sand wasn't just sand. A bottle cap here. A shredded piece of a straw there. A tangle of fishing net half-buried near the tideline looked very ugly.

A stretch of beach littered with plastic bottles, straws, bottle caps, and a tangled fishing net. Once I started noticing, I couldn't stop. I counted seventeen pieces of visible plastic within arm's reach of where I was sitting. Seventeen, in a patch of sand no bigger than a beach towel.

Why I'm Writing about This Trip

I'm not a biologist. I'm not an environmental scientist, and I don't have a background in waste management. What I have is a memory of sitting on that towel, plastic cap in hand, feeling very upset by how normal the situation was to all the people at the beach.

This trip post isn't going to be a lecture. What I want is to take advantage of this place to think out loud about what they should think about the use of plastic.

What I am going to write from now on

Short, honest posts about sea and ocean plastic — what it is, where it comes from, and the small decisions that we take which can add up and result in good benefits to life and health.

One Topic I Can't Stop Thinking About: Microplastics

Of everything I've read since that day, one thing that caused a headache: microplastics. Not the bottles and bags you can see and pick up, but the pieces too small to notice — fragments worn down by sun and waves until they're smaller than a grain of rice, then smaller than a grain of sand, then small enough to be mistaken for food.

Illustration showing plastic bottles, bags, and containers floating on the ocean surface, breaking down into microplastic fragments that later on can be found in fish. Every visible piece of plastic on that beach is a future source of microplastics....

Facts that I should not forget

*** 5 mm*** or smaller — the rough size threshold that defines a "microplastic"
100 years may take to some plastic items to fully break down in the ocean
1 bottle can shed thousands of fragments over its lifetime in water

Conclusion
I don't have a clear plan yet. What I have is a habit I didn't have before that day: I look at the waterline differently now. Every trip to the coast starts the same way it always did — towel, sunscreen, warm drinks — but the new thing is how to implement the idea of plastic pollution awareness.

Hopefully to see your opinion in the comments
@davidesimoncini
@wakeupkitty

Written after one very ordinary beach day that turned out not to be ordinary at all.