I row on the bay in Asunción.
That's how I learned how bad it is.
After every heavy rain, the water turns into a moving landfill. Plastic bottles, bags, styrofoam, pieces of god-knows-what — all of it floating, drifting, slowly poisoning the place. You don't need a study or a satellite image. You just need eyes and a paddle.
For a while, my first instinct was the obvious one: clean the bay. Pick up the trash. Mobilize volunteers, scoop it out, repeat.
Then I started thinking more carefully — and talking to organizations that have been doing water cleanup for years. The conclusion was uncomfortable but obvious:
By the time the trash is in the bay, you've already lost.
It's spread out. It's broken into smaller pieces. It sinks. It's gone.
The trash doesn't appear in the bay magically. It comes in through the rivers. Three of them feed into our part of the bay, and every single one is a delivery system for plastic. People who live along those rivers — and there are a lot of them — throw their garbage into the water when it rains. They think the rain carries it away. That it disappears. That it's no longer their problem.
It doesn't disappear. It ends up downstream, where I row.
So we made a decision: we're not going to keep chasing trash in the bay. We're going to stop it upstream — in the river, before it ever reaches us.
We're going to build interceptors.
Next post: who's actually doing this with me, why every previous attempt in Paraguay failed, and what we're doing differently.