Yesterday morning I got up to check the gutter in front of the
house I live in. I do a regular check to clear the gutter of materials that it
is not supposed to convey or contain. Pursuant to my regular clearance, and
after I checked the gutter I realized a need to clear some foreign materials
from the gutter. The materials I normally clear from the gutter are plastic,
stones, wood, crown of soda drinks and shaving blade. Other foreign materials
that are thrown into the gutter are excreta, soap, fruit and vegetable peelings
etc. The plastic is made up of mainly discarded water sachet, yoghurt sachet
and black polythene bags.
Today as I was leaving the house, I
checked the gutter again to find out its state of cleanliness after I cleaned
it yesterday. To my annoyance I found some plastic in the gutter. The gutter
was not meant to carry certain materials like the ones I have already
mentioned. Gutters are meant to be conveyer belts for liquid waste! Gutters
eventually empty themselves into bigger conveyer belts like water bodies, which
together flow over one massive global network of water conveyer belt. This
massive conveyer belt comprise of rivers, springs, oceans, seas etc.
Just about 200 meters behind my house
is the Atlantic Ocean. The gutter that runs in front of the house I live in
empties itself into the Atlantic Ocean. The gutter was designed to convey a
particular type of material- liquid waste. However, when it rains, it conveys
everything (liquid waste and others) in it into the Atlantic Ocean, in this
instance.
The foreign materials in a gutter, when not taken out of the gutter,
end up in a water body polluting it. You depend on water for your life. The
water you drink every day is derived from a water body. The quality of the
water body determines the quality of the water you drink. The long and short of
it is that the foreign material you drop into a gutter running in front of your
house may determine the quality of the water you drink. It is a boomerang!
Dropping foreign materials into
gutters is not a sustainable lifestyle and do not augur well for a clean and
balanced natural environment. You better stop it!
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