I love water...

Tequila, Caglar and I have been taking lots of long walks along the coast. Tequila follows us tripping on our heels, sniffing, swimming, tasting things. It is beautiful here. It is pretty remote where his parents house is with lots of air and space. We walk amongst low lying shrubs, olives trees and look at the expanse of blue sea. When the sun is setting the whole environment seems to take on pastel hues, pink, blues, purples, yellows. As we walk along the water though there is always trash, plastic bottles, broken glass, fishing nets, etc. I have been picking some of it up as we walk(even got Caglar into it sometimes). It seems ironic that I want a pair of plastic gloves to pick up all the plastic.

A previous post I talked about the floating plastic garbage dump in the middle of the Pacific. My sister wrote me that she is happy that I am thinking about these issues but what am I going to do about it? I have been thinking about this as well for a while. Especially since I am currently residing in Turkey, and it's different here. I saw recycle bins at the government building the other day but then looked inside and it was treated as a trash can, food etc. in there. Here there is alot of re purposing. Using plastic bags from the grocery store for the garbage bag. Using all the glass jars to hold other home made treats but no city recycling that I have seen. Another of the many reasons I need to learn Turkish better.


















Anyways what I have personally decided to do in my current situations is to always fill my nalgene bottle with water instead of buying plastic containers. For our new cafe I want to buy water pitchers for customers instead of the norm here of putting a liter plastic bottle on the table. I will continue to pick up the beach little by little every time tequila and I take a walk. Also to further investigate the state of Turkish trash removal, recycling, and dumping. Also it is so dry here I wonder where the water comes from? In our little community they re purpose shower/toilet water to water some grassy areas. So his mom tells us to not play in the grass. Also here, everyone in every city I've lived in (3 Istanbul, Eskisehir and didim) People always buy the big culligan water jugs...is the tap water safe to drink?

People are doing things, talking! there is this guy named Dave who decided to save all his trash for one year. It causes him to be extremely aware of how he is living.He write about it on his blog 365 days of trash Here's the kernel for his project...

The idea for this project came about six months ago as I was throwing something away in the garbage. It occurred to me that I was doing nothing more than that. I was making it go away, not dealing with it, not accounting for it, simply removing it from my sight. When you think of it in simple terms like that, it’s really quite insane. I came to the realization that if we were all accountable for our waste, if we couldn’t simply make it disappear, we’d have to deal with some pretty ugly truths about the way we live. And in so doing, it would cause us to start making better decisions about what we buy, where we buy, and what’s left over when we are done with that purchase.

Here's more specifically about plastic water bottles