Canning the Round Numbers

Scientific American online just published the following article of mine, reposted here in full:

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Ever notice that we’ve got a thing for round numbers? We like our data neat and tidy.

The world of ocean pollution and litter prevention is filled with nice round numbers. Like those lists of how long various consumer goods take to go away once they escape into the environment...

Source: http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/
cruises/super/biodegradation.htm 

But recent finds on the beach have me asking: Are those numbers actually any good? Take aluminum.

An oft-repeated line says that aluminum takes 200 years to break down. Now I’ve found old pieces of aluminum -- like this top to a steel can from the early pulltab era, most likely used on a Coke product c. 1971-72:

Found by author March 12, 2012, Bay View beach, Saco, Maine 

This bit of aluminum, 40 years old, is on its way to disappearing. In something maybe not too far from the 200-year mark.

But you see, I’ve found other pulltab-era can tops that tell a very different story. This one, also about 40 years old, is still in remarkable shape:

Found by author April 10, 2012, Curtis Cove, Biddeford, Maine 

On the flip side, this one, probably more like 30 years old, is more than half gone:

Found by author February 29, 2012, Bay View

And this very modern can is already turning into Swiss cheese after perhaps a year of exposure:

Found by author April 25, 2012, Bay View

It turns out, the breakdown of aluminum isn’t a set event, it’s a system. One in which all the pieces have to fall into place for it to corrode back to dust.

When iron rusts, the new compound -- iron oxide, Fe2O3 -- takes up more physical space than the old. That’s why rust blisters & bubbles out. Those blisters expose more fresh iron underneath, which then rusts, and on and on until it’s all gone.

But when aluminum oxidizes, the aluminum oxide doesn’t take up any more space. It maintains its tight bond with the underlying aluminum. It’s actually a brilliantly weathertight seal. An undisturbed piece of aluminum can exist for... well, indefinitely long.

Now if you take that aluminum outside its comfort zone pH of 4.5 to 8.5, its protective oxide film will fail and true corrosion can set in. But such pH levels are rare in the ocean.

So what happened to the aluminum I’ve found? Corrosion got a boost from something more mechanical: abrasion. Get currents to drag aluminum back and forth through sand and gravel. Over & over & over. Each scrape wears a little surface aluminum oxide away, revealing fresh aluminum, which then transforms into more aluminum oxide. Tide rolls in, scrape scrape. Tide rolls out, scrape scrape. Maybe something acidic settles on it briefly, dissolve dissolve. Do it just right, and you can erode away an entire can in a matter of months -- not centuries.

Do it wrong, and you bury that aluminum under inert protective sediment.

Which brings me back to those photos. For the first year and a half at my beach, zero pulltab-era (30+ years old) can tops washed in. In the past six months six have washed in -- four within one month!

Why now?

Well, in recent months a sand bar has appeared at my beach at low tide.

March 12, 2012, Bay View

Never seen it before, but it’s there now. All that sand has come from further offshore. Where it perhaps once covered, buried, and protected those old bits of aluminum -- some for years, some for decades.

The study of how beached flotsam changes over time -- and what that can say about larger environmental change like seafloor shifts -- is interesting in its own right. But for the purpose at hand, it’s just a reminder: The world is not a static place. It’s ever-evolving. Things get moved, stuck, buried, freed, bashed. Each piece of debris has its own journey, and can tell a vastly different story.

Here’s one last photo.

Photo credit: Tim Wolter

Obviously, this isn’t aluminum. It’s a hewn log. This week a friend pulled it out of a ditch he was excavating at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. The ditch was in use around AD 200 and was sealed about AD 213, making this discarded chunk of wood ~1800 years old! It shouldn’t survive. But because of the soil conditions, it did.

If organics can do that, aluminum can do it that much more easily.

A blanket statement, like “Aluminum takes 200 years* to degrade,” denies the fact that the environment is a complicated thing. Worse, most often it just isn’t true (noted well on NOAA’s Marine Debris FAQ page).

One beer can lost today will be around in AD 4000. Another one will be gone by next year.

If the “facts” on aluminum are so far off, what does that say about the rest of these lists? 10 years for a polyethylene bag to completely go away? Where does that come from?

So a word of caution to environmental sites. Posting, as fact, nice round numbers that have no relation to reality (other than the metaphorical stopped clock being right twice a day) does a disservice. It misinforms -- and it risks discrediting the site when a person sees different results with their own eyes. We should avoid the pitfall of pretending there is any scientific truth behind something that’s just, well, a nice round number.

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* This number gets hedged sometimes, from “80 to 200 years” in one direction, to “200 to 500 years” in the opposite. More evidence that there’s little if any science backing it up.

Collection Report April 25, 2012

Wednesday, April 25. 9:15AM. 55 degrees, bright sun, hour after low tide. Had been away for two weeks, as I spent the previous week visiting The Mouse with the family. First missed week on-site since June last year! So, what would the extra week's worth of tides bring in the way of flotsam?

This, and... well, not a lot more. This can was actually among the most interesting finds of the day. More on why down below. But as you can see by this shot...

...the beach was again a clean slate. The little wrack that did exist (mostly in Zone N) was old, dried reeds from 2011 still rolling around:

I've gone on for some months about the changes at Bay View over the past year. But with spring now "sprung," this image tell the story the best:

In an age of global sea-level rise and beach loss, the dunes at Bay View are actually advancing. 20 feet down the beach slope just in the past year! That can only happen if the energy of the sea lets it happen. A few bad waves, and you get this:

The energy coming in here is just weaker than it was a year ago. Waves aren't making it as high up the slope. And they're carrying far less detritus -- natural and manmade -- than before. The best logic behind this is that the seafloor is shifting. Sand bars have reared their heads at Bay View during very low tides. Natural buffers, absorbing the fury of the ocean -- and blocking seafloor debris. For how long? Don't know.

But for now, they cause this result. Zone N:

31 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4 (3 foam scraps, 1 cup bottom)
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 3 (2 wrappers, 1 straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can, can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 6 (2 toys, tennisball, package scrap, 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
• Paper/wood: 1 (paper scrap)
• Misc./unique: 0

A few locally lost toys for my daughter's collection. A few scraps. A few thoughtless smokers. A rotted can...

Quickly over to Zone S:

9 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 2
• Fishing misc.: 3 (fishing line, shotgun shell, shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (bottlecap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 1 (bedpost finial)
• Misc./unique: 0

A bedpost finial? Really?

So the game here has changed. But back to that aluminum can.

You've surely seen those enviromentalist site lists, showing how long things take to break down:

If you say "It takes 200 years for an aluminum can to break down!" and I can find one that's rotting away after ~6 months, you risk losing me for everything else you try to say. We all love round numbers; but we're a little more partial to our own eyes.

Fighting the Tide

The first half of this week found my daughter and me in southern New Jersey. One day we rode down to Ocean City, a lovely coastal resort town with a 2 1/2 mile boardwalk and bustling tourist industry.

Ocean City is actually a barrier island. An ephemeral sand mound that forms in front of mainlands, and shifts in and out of existence within a few centuries -- the blink of a geological eye. But, as at many barrier islands, Ocean City's charms quickly drew settlers, investments, and infrastructure. And they now want to stay put.

Cue the eternal fight between nature and man, with the boardwalk and beach as the front line. This town is no stranger to nature's wrath.

1962 Ash Wednesday storm
Source

1991 October "Perfect Storm"
Source

Over the past century engineers have dumped countless tons of imported sand onto her beaches, only to watch it wash away again. 22 times from 1952 to 1995 to a tune of $83 million (p.3 of the PDF), a $21 million effort in 2010, and $7 million more in 2012. Here is the latest effort -- an artificial dune system, staked off from foot traffic and heavily planted with dune grass and beach plums.

Taken by the author, May 1, 2012

The hope is that this manufactured dune will absorb storm surges and help maintain the beach -- so tourists will continue to come, frolic, and spend money. It may, or may not, for a while. But sea level is rising...

Remarkable NOAA Website on sea-level trends:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml

...and will continue to rise. It's a losing battle, getting more expensive as the waves strengthen. Eventually the annual funds will run dry. Then? Then comes a choice between a few options, all bad.

Which makes Ocean City just one of thousands of such spots around the world here in the 21st Century.

The archaeologist in me has seen this before. This is Ostia, for centuries imperial Rome's proud port town:

Source

But by the time St. Augustine visited it around AD 400, parts of the city were a swamp, and rubble had been dumped along the Tiber to hold it back. A few generations later the city was a ruin of hovels. It became so infested with swamp disease and malaria that later scavengers largely left it alone. In a way, a slow-death Pompeii, only rediscovered in the 20th Century.

And it's not just oceans and seas that change with time. Here's Hadrian's Wall in Cumbria, northern England,  running east to west (top to bottom), approaching what was once the eastern abutment to the Roman bridge over the River Irthing (bottom of picture).

Source

Except... where's the river? It's moved, about 100 feet west, over the past 1800 years. A raging flood or two changed its course, undercut the western abutment, and brought low this engineering marvel. One of many Hadrian's Wall bridges that met similar fates.

Bridges. Cities. Monuments to man's ingenuity. Laid to waste.

So what does all this have to do with the Flotsam Diaries? Everything. Today we build condos & business districts at the edge of shifting sands. We build whole cities in flood plains. We fill them with plastic. And then we're shocked when Mother Nature does what Mother Nature does.

New Orleans, 9th Ward, post-Hurricane Katrina 2005
Source

Back at Ocean City, nature is again going to do what she does. Sooner or later. Regardless of a man-made sand dune. And when she does, there will just be that much more persistent plastic wreckage in the ocean for my daughter's grandchildren to deal with. Because of the choices that we make today.

So maybe we could make better choices?

Collection Report April 9, 2012

Good morning from Bay View beach, Monday April 9. 8:05AM, low tide. Cool, colorful morning with bands of thick low clouds.

Being just after full moon, this "spring tide" was one of the lowest of the month. And again in the distance you can see Bay View's new sandbar peeking out from the receding waters. The same sandbar that seems to be vastly changing the shape of the beach this year -- and altering how much washes in, organic or otherwise.

The ultra-low tide exposed a complete bed of live sand dollars, including these folks:

"Fancy meeting you here"

And the terrace had another surprise -- in one small section the churning waves had sorted & collected a pile of boulders:

Only this one spot in some
600 ft of beach did this

A little more of the magic of the ocean.

The latest overnight high-tide -- also being a spring tide -- was one of the stronger ones since last November, pushing all the old wrack almost up to the dune's edge, leaving a blank slate in its place.

Much of this is new, clean sand dragged in, probably from the sandbar. Outside my zones, lobster traps that had been fully exposed were now half-buried in soft sand. All that energy & sand -- but zero new wrack -- is usually a harbinger of a small collection.

And sure enough, Zone N:

30 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (6 asphalt, 2 concrete, 1 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 4 (3 rope, 1 claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (straw, PS cup top, microwave plate scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (gum wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (rubber chunk, sand bag)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
• Paper/wood: 1 (paper cup)
• Misc./unique: 2 (cords)

The only find of note:

When sandbags are made from plastic fiber, and they fail & wash out to sea, they don't go away.

Zone S:

9 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (asphalt, shingle, brick sliver)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 3 (1 rope, 2 lobster trap vinyl scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Bay View's new personality started weaving itself together in late November, and it continues. The gunk is all out there; it's just chosen to spare Bay View beach this winter and spring.

About 5 miles south, at Curtis Cove in Biddeford, the story is vastly different. Here's just the derelict fishing rope that washed into 150 feet of beach there during the same week:

Think you know what's happening in the ocean? Dig deeper.

Say It

If you see it, and walk by it, and forget about it, so will everyone else. That moment hinges on you. It's you who has the power to say "Enough."

April 23, 2012
Mr. Robert Collins
Theater Manager
The Cinemagic & IMAX in Saco
779 Portland Road Saco, ME 04072

Dear Mr. Collins:
Yesterday, Earth Day, our family came to Saco Cinemagic to see “The Lorax.” Imagine our shock to see this scene lining the edges of Cinemagic’s parking lot:

It was similar all around the perimeter. 100s of feet just completely trashed.

Obviously litter isn’t just a problem at Cinemagic Saco. It seems it’s everywhere now. Streets, gutters, parks, and of course swirls of garbage in the ocean. I study what washes up onto local beaches, and the amount of pollution in the Gulf of Maine is horrible.

But if we allow scenes like this at our places of business, we’re just making it all worse.

I hope you will take the time to send out crews more regularly to the perimeter of the parking lot, and make it clear that litter & garbage just aren’t OK.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,


Harold Johnson
“The Flotsam Diaries”

Sent Tuesday, April 24. Will post response if one comes.

Collection Report April 3, 2012

After a nice Easter holiday and trip to Mouse land, time to catch back up with beach cleanups.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012. Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. 1:30PM, an hour before low tide. 50 degrees, pure sunshine, gusty wind running from north to south.

Dead water in the distance. Clumps of seaweed in the receding tide staying perfectly still as the waves above roll over them. Only this lone bit of weed managed to beach. And, of course, it had rope in it.

Another day notable not for how much washed in, but what it was. Like this:

I think nature did this; happens a lot

To this:

Modern...ish.... I think. Too far gone.

To this:

Largest horse mussel I've seen here!

And, sadly, to this:

Complete with claw & bite marks,
for extra yuck factor

Quickly then, on to the details. Zone N:

44 finds:

• Building materials: 8 (6 asphalt, 1 block, 1 shingle)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 2
• Fishing misc.: 12 (3 rope, 9 lobster trap vinyl scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (spoon, cup scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (bottlecap, crushed aluminum can)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 10 (toy shovel head, 2 firecrackers, watch strap, tampon applicator, tear-top, bottlecap seal, 1 scrap >1", 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 8
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

And quickly over to Zone S:

16 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (3 asphalt, 2 shingle)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 2 (tiny buoy scrap, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (3 can scraps, 1 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (tennis ball, 1 scrap >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (fabric scrap)

With each week now at Bay View it's become clear that the bay is very different than a year before. Dune grass is advancing, waves have no energy, and the amount of "stuff" -- organic & otherwise -- that they bring to the shore is negligible. It's all out there. But Bay View is becoming less of a place to see it come in. The question is, for how long?

Laughter and Tears

Our family just returned from a week at Disney World's Animal Kingdom Lodge. Our 5-year-old's first trip to Disney -- and for her a truly magical week. For me, sitting on the balcony with her watching the sun set over a savanna of fairly wild zebras, giraffes, antelopes, and colorful exotic birds -- well, that's magic too.

A good day

Of course, the real world is always around us, even in Disney's 40-square-mile "Girdle of Melian." And I learned long ago that the Flotsam Diaries isn't something I just turn off for a week. So what does Disney look like through the lens of a Flotsam Diarist?

In a word: Schizophrenic.

Walt Disney World heavily touts its green credentials. And given that it's set off 1/3 of its acreage as protected habitat, and was an early adopter of waste-to-energy and zero-emission vehicles, it's at least made an effort to earn them. In fact, Disney holds the State of Florida's "Green Lodging Certification" for all of its resorts.

But a grain of salt is needed. Walt Disney World made Central Florida's economy, and supports it still. Florida has no state income tax. Its coffers depend on tourism, largely Disney tourism. So if the latest buzzword is "green," it behooves the State to shower Disney with green accolades.

This isn't to say that Disney isn't actually trying. It's just that the signs I saw this past week never added up to a coherent story. Take the Mara cafe right at the Lodge. They offer reusable mugs to Lodge guests, and stock paper straws, not plastic.

Both an excellent start

But everything else in the whole cafe is wrapped in single-use plastic. This is what a meal there looks like:

Would you like polymers with that?

Plastic salad, plastic fruit cup, plastic cutlery, plastic coated paper plates, plastic candies. Even the apples were individually plastic-wrapped -- only the bananas & oranges were spared. We tried to cut back, but with limited success;* the healthiest foods were the most plasticized.

And look at that reusable mug. Way too big & bulky to lug through theme parks. In our week I never saw one of them used outside of the Lodge. Instead, vendors were hawking 20oz bottles of Dasani water at $2.75 each. That translates into $17.60/gallon, whereas well-monitored & regulated tap costs about $0.01/gallon! A company that really wants to promote & protect the environment would chill & filter water fountains and encourage re-use of visitors' bottles. But what for-profit entity would turn its back on such a cash cow?

Next, there was the hot & cold with recycling. Some parts of the parks offered obvious recycling bins next to the trash cans, some didn't. Some restaurants used care with their resources (the "Lunching Pad" in Tomorrowland offered cardboard trays and well-marked signs on where to recycle those trays); most didn't. It was literally the luck of the draw. In 2010 Disney claimed that it recycled a full 60% of all the 303,000 tons of waste produced on its properties. From what I saw, I don't know how they get to that number. Perhaps, like Europe, they consider burning trash for energy to be "recycling"?

I ran into still more schizophrenia at the shops. On the one hand, Disney has done something truly impressive -- and rare. Their shopping bags are made of 100% recycled plastic.

This is uneconomic with current technology; a real money loser. But it's good PR. On the other hand, about 0% of these bags will actually get recycled again into anything, so it's dubiously-green good PR. Worse, where were the reusable totes? I don't recall seeing reusable totes at any of the stores we visited; if they were there, they weren't being promoted.

Lastly, a poignant note of self-awareness in the Animal Kingdom Lodge literature. The Lodge is a special place. They've carved a functioning savanna out of the Central Florida jungle, populated it with untamed African animals of grace & beauty, and are very protective of them. As here:

Balloons -- of any kind -- are forbidden at the Lodge. Disney knows that balloons kill animals. They know that balloons escape, and it's usually impossible to track where they've gone until it's too late.

Yet just 3 miles away, vendors sells helium balloons to young, wide-eyed visitors by the hundreds (thousands?). The great folks at Balloons Blow have found Disney balloons on their beach 130 miles away. Who really thinks there are no Disney balloons lurking in the undergrowth on Animal Kingdom property? Disney knows they're there, they have to. But kids love balloons, balloons make money, so balloons are still sold in droves.

Disney's motto is "We Create Happiness." Today, happiness equals convenience. So for all the green talk, Disney caters to a modern throwaway culture, and doesn't do much to curb that culture. It makes nods, it makes efforts. But in the end, it doesn't make waves.

Which, in a way, makes it even worse. Disney property is kept fastidiously clean. But its budget & grounds crew would be the envy of any city treasury in the world. Disney has resources that few places can boast. If people get the belief that they can generate countless tons of waste and it all magically goes "away," what lesson is brought back home? How many visitors see this one sign tucked away in the Animal Kingdom Safari, and remember it two seconds later?

When the millions of tourists leave Disney's carefully crafted fairy tale and return to their lives, wouldn't it be nice if this idea was part of the top tier of good memories & inspiration going forward?

It is a small world, after all.

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* The water bottle wasn't my choice. Florida's groundwater runs through soluble limestone -- tap tastes minerally, and can be unpleasant, albeit safe. I'm fine with the taste, my daughter called it "Daddy's gross water."