To the Editor:

I am an artist who makes posters out of beach garbage — that is, I walk the beaches and pick up any trash I find; most of it is plastic. I bring that garbage home, attach it to cardboard, and add a wooden frame. It displays the garbage I have found on each half-hour to two-hour walk I take.

For 30 years, I have wanted a way to both tell people about the plastic that I find on local beaches and to document what is left behind by beachgoers and what washes in on each tide. Through the years, and with our world’s increased plastic use, the amount and variety of garbage are overwhelming both to me and to the wild animals that have to live in it and with it.

I ask myself daily, Are we humans so selfish and hardened that a plastic water bottle or a Styrofoam takeout container has become more important to us than a clean landscape, a clean ocean, or the health and lives of our wildlife?

Recycling is a noble effort, but not a solution that can accommodate the tremendous amount and varieties of plastic that we use. Reduction is the only solution. Manufacturers are of little help. Almost every item for sale is plastic or is completely wrapped in plastic, both food and nonfood products. The cost of this convenience — inexpensive, hard to break — is being felt. But what is the true cost of that convenience?

What is the true cost of that beverage bottle that ends up at the bottom of the ocean, the takeout container that breaks down into tiny pieces, gets eaten by birds that then die, the plastic bag that catches in a tree on top of nesting birds, the straw swallowed by a sea turtle, the potato chip bag that breaks down over time into glittery microplastics that mix in with our beach sand, or that great-looking polyester shirt that will eventually go to the landfill and remain there for several hundred years?

None of these Items are necessary.

Please help clean our stressed-out natural environment by changing your daily choices. Remember, plastic is forever. Once manufactured, it will remain plastic forever. It will break down into smaller and smaller pieces, called microplastics. These are in the air we breathe, in our food and water supplies. When burned, plastic creates other toxic gases that make us sick.

We, as consumers, have the power to change our world by saying no to plastics.

Call or email your favorite manufacturers and request plastic-free choices.

I recommend that everyone see the film “A Plastic Ocean.”

Through May, my posters are being shown in the lobby of Martha’s Vineyard Community Television, 58 Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5.

They are shocking and sad, but they are one consequence of our overuse and careless use of plastics.

Suzanna Nickerson
Edgartown