“Flying Garbage:” A Big Environmental Threat

An Iranian citizen journalist, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity, wrote the following article on the ground inside Iran.

I am a nature tourist and spend most of my weekends relaxing and enjoying the outside. But for a while now I’ve been concerned about something: nowadays, the Iranian countryside is being ruined by people littering — plastic is everywhere.

Sometimes, when I’m driving down a road, I’ll spot long, shiny white surfaces in fields or at the foot of mountains. But when I look more carefully, I realize that it is actually the sun reflecting off the plastic that has been left behind.

This plastic littering is not only confined to flat, low-lying lands though. It is also on mountaintops, by riverbanks and in forests. A significant part of this garbage comes from inconsiderate passersby who themselves want to enjoy nature. After this, wind, rain and other natural and unnatural factors will carry this litter away and deposit it elsewhere, ruining other places in the process.  

So many of Iran’s beautiful and inviting parts of nature are today laden with plastic, to the extent that they have lost their beauty and charm.

This littering has always infuriated me but a few days ago I came across something I hadn’t noticed before. Through my exploring, I’ve noticed that there is a large amount of garbage, mostly plastic bags, in hard-to-reach places, places that are inaccessible to ordinary visitors.

Who brings these ugly and harmful plastic bags and leaves them at the heart of nature? Everyone knows that environmental scientists say it takes 500 years for plastic bags to disintegrate and are damaging to nature.

A few days back, I was exploring a protected area near to where I live when a powerful wind started up. Then, as I watched in shock, it picked up a vast amount of plastic, shopping plastic bags included, and carried them off.

The scene stuck in my mind and it dawned on me that the same cheap plastic bags that we carry our groceries in and then throw away without thinking have the potential to do a lot of damage to nature and the environment. These bags, even if we put them in garbage cans, end up in garbage dumps but, because they are very light, the wind is able to pick them up and scatter them everywhere.

If you travel around, look around. You will notice a huge volume of plastic bags lying around. This not only strips nature of its beauty, but also harms the creatures and plants inhabiting the area.

This is why I refer to them as “flying garbage” as they easily fly from one place to another. Our only solution is to use them less. If you go shopping, use fewer plastic bags. Better still, use bags made of cloth so you don’t need plastic bags at all.

I hope anybody who reads this heeds this advice so we can prevent any more harm being done to Iran’s once-beautiful countryside.

Farah Parsapour, Citizen-Journalist, Karaj

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