Since our mayor is asking our city council to significantly scale back the pending ordinance banning plastic foam in Malibu, it follows that the City Council made a significant error when they voted for it 4-1 last April. Something that they may want to consider in their deliberations is that plastic foam has largely replaced balsa wood in the manufacture of surfboards, boogie boards and the like.
Banning plastic foam from our beaches would necessarily ban surfboards from our beaches. Which enforcement agency would be responsible, the Sheriff, the lifeguards, the Coast Guard? Enforcement of this ban would be fun to watch.
The upside of this is that we would no longer need to keep the waters of Surfrider Beach pristine because there would no longer be surfers to protect, so Tapia could go into full release.
Maybe the owners of beach homes should form vigilante groups, such as the minuteman patrolling the Arizona border, to ferret out the illegal use of surfboards.
It seems all this started because our mayor wanted to protect fish from feeding on “little, tiny pieces” of Polystyrene. I’m sure our mayor’s intentions were sincere; it’s easy for good intentions to escalate. As they say, a good deed never goes unpunished.
Polystyrene or Poly Ethylene Terephthalate, the stuff that soft drinks, fine wines, cleaners and oils are packaged in, isn’t prone to breaking up into tiny pieces. Foamed Polystyrene or Styrofoam is a more likely candidate so maybe that’s what our good mayor was referring to. I’ve kept fish tanks and I’ve baited fishhooks and from my experience fish are as finicky eaters as our cats. Maybe that’s why cats love to dine on fish. Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Our City Council will want to ban cats next.
We dine at sushi bars, fork our Branzino at our favorite seafood restaurants and our leftovers are packaged, to go, in Styrofoam containers, quaintly referred to as carcass coffins, to be devoured later as midnight snakes. Now our City Council has voted to save the fish. I’ve lived (“resided” if I were in the Colony) on Malibu Road for 43 years and I have never observed evidence that our fish were in peril from “OD-ing” on Styrofoam. Where are the bodies hidden? They’d be easy to spot. With a tummy full of Styrofoam they’d float with a high freeboard.
Jack Singleton