One Danish community appears to be living by the motto: “It’s better to look good than to feel good.”
Slagelse Municipality came under fire this week after national broadcaster Danmarks Radio, reported it spent $150,000 to have a bulldozer remove seaweed and plastic from the popular Stillinge Beach twice a week during the summer – only to take the waste a few yards deep into the sea and drop it back into the water.
Torkel Gissel Nielsen, a professor at Technical University of Denmark, told the network the practice was “completely idiotic.”
“This is by no means a helping hand to nature,” Katherine Richardson, a professor in biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen, wrote in an email to Vice. “This is about one thing — convenience for beach goers.”
Slagelse Municipality did not respond to an email from Vice, but Deputy Mayor Villum Christensen defended the method to Danmarks Radio, saying beach goers want the beach to be “neat and clean,” like vacation destinations in Southern Europe.
Christensen’s said cigarette buds and other small pieces of plastic will “end up [in the sea] for the most part, either way.”