Maps of Crazy Town is a literary and geographic companion to the Crazy Town podcast. The maps explore places on Earth that epitomize the tragic messes of modernity.
Location: Mar de Plastico (Sea of Plastic), Andalusia, Mediterranean coast of Spain
Lat 36°43’05″N Lon 2°44’30″W
Ecoregion: Southeastern Iberian Shrubs and Woodlands
Introduction
The term “Mar de Plastico” or “Sea of Plastic” might bring to mind the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that conglomeration of discarded and mishandled plastic debris circulating in the world’s biggest ocean. That’s icky enough, but it’s the wrong sea of plastic, and may even be deserving of less outrage than the ultra-icky actual Mar de Plastico, which sits on solid ground along the southern edge of Spain. It’s the greatest concentration of plastic greenhouses on Earth and an unnatural, resource-intensive way to grow some tomatoes.
Google Earth Tour
In this 3-minute video, I take you on a guided tour of the Mar de Plastico, spanning views from the scale of the globe down to street level.
Stats and Scale
The size of the Mar de Plastico is mindboggling. I drew a polygon around the main blob of greenhouses and found that it sports a perimeter of 106 miles (170 km) and an area of 123 square miles (~32,000 hectares). I also marked 5 “satellite” Mars de Plastico and noted plenty of other concentrations of greenhouses that more than double the 123 square miles of plastic-coated land. This region of Spain, the Poniente Almeriense, comes wrapped in plastic, just like a box of crap purchased on Prime Day from Amazon.com (if that box took up 32,000 hectares). Who knows? Maybe the cucumbers grown under all this plastic are the same ones that end up in the produce section of Trader Joe’s, wrapped in plastic to seal in the flavorlessness.
The city of El Ejido, home to about 85,000 people, sits in the northwestern part of the Mar de Plastico. On satellite imagery, the city looks like a morsel that has been devoured by a plastic-bodied amoeba.
The buildout of plastic-covered greenhouse structures has been swift. In the 1950s, the area mostly supported shrubland, pasture, and small plots of seasonal crops grown outdoors. In the 1960s, the polyethylene structures began to sprout like the first pimples of a nightmarish adolescent acne attack.
Food Production
The Mar de Plastico is sometimes called by another (more positive) name: the “vegetable garden of Europe.” The thermal and wind-blocking benefits of the plastic, intensive irrigation, and industrial agriculture techniques have enabled the region to grow an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 million tons of fruits and vegetables per year, a major source of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and melons. This production is especially notable as the region features some of the driest conditions in Europe. By this point you may have guessed that there might be a teeny-tiny cost or two to using and abusing resources for this method of growing food.
Environmental Toll
On the Google Earth tour, maps, and aerial photos, the spatters of white that make up the conglomerations of greenhouses look like abundant droppings from flocks of seabirds – that is, if each bird were about the size of a Godzilla monster. Being coated by massive splats of bird doo would be far less offensive than the reality of being drenched in polyethylene plastic. In the first scenario, the soils of the region would benefit from the rich deposit of organic nutrients, the ecosystem would process and reuse the matter over time, and a diversity of plants and animals would thrive. In the second scenario, land management is beholden to short-term financial decisions, and all that plastic acts as a poison like no other that will degrade into micro- and nano-plastic bits and contaminate the biosphere for eons to come.
According to Food Unfolded, the Mar de Plastico generates about 33,500 metric tons of plastic waste each year, and some of it is illegally dumped. Agri-plastics have been found blocking riverbeds and in the digestive tracts of animals. A sperm whale that washed up dead on the Almeria coast had 17 kilograms of plastic in its gut, mostly from the greenhouse sheeting.
Watering all those crops under plastic has resulted in serious groundwater depletion and degradation. Again according to Food Unfolded, aquifers convey 80% of the water used for irrigation in the region. They are being drained faster than they can be refilled. Salinity and nitrate pollution are also on the rise, not surprising for a coastal aquifer that is being overused. After a hot day of farming in the greenhouses, who wouldn’t like to sit down and drink a nice cold glass of saltwater?
And let’s not overlook the human appropriation of net primary productivity. Wow, that sure is a lot of jargon just to say that people are greedy! If we commandeer a massive ecosystem for plasti-culture, then there’s not a lot of energy and matter that can be used by plants and non-human animals who would otherwise be partying on the coast of Spain.
Social Toll
I don’t want to pile on, but it turns out the Sea of Plastic does not provide the most inviting waters for workers to swim in. In a 2020 article, The Guardian reported that the region contained 92 informal worker slums that “house” 7,000-10,000 people. Given the harsh working and living conditions (including breathing the carcinogenic fumes from the plastic sheeting), at least the workers who pick the fruits and vegetables get paid well. Oops! Strike that. One man interviewed for the article said he was paid 5 euros per hour, well under the legal minimum wage, while sometimes working from sunup to sundown.
Technological “Miracle”
Yes, you can grow a lot of tomatoes in a relatively small space inside these plastic hot-houses, but did any of the Icarus-minded engineers and plastic-film aficionados ever stop to ask some simple questions? What are the long-term prospects for this practice? And what will eventually happen to all that plastic? The Mar de Plastico is the logical result of the techno-hubris that has infected the human brain like a parasitic worm eating its way through a dwindling supply of gray matter.
In a bizarre twist, all that white plastic on top of the greenhouses tends to reflect so much solar radiation that the Mar de Plastico is cooler than surrounding areas. Hooray, it seems we can solve global warming by coating the world in plastic. Mundo de Plastico here we come!
Maps of Crazy Town is a literary and geographic companion to the Crazy Town podcast.
Photos licensed from Adobe (Adobe? Isn’t that a natural substance? We’re talking good old man-made plastic in this space!)