Thursday, December 9, 2010

Collection Report Dec 1-2, 2010

Welcome back to Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. December 1 was mild, mid-40s, but blustery. (In fact, a gust clocked at 41 mph.) Gray clouds were gathering, so I snuck in before the rains -- and the next high tide.
The flats at low tide
Remember the two tide lines & the berm of just one week before? All that stuff I thought I was figuring out about how the contour of the beach was changing? Well, do you see any of that in the picture below?
Me neither
Clearly I have a lot to learn about how wind & tide, current & rain really behave. Here's one thing I did discover. The winds buffeting me on Dec. 1 were largely from the SE; they were blowing in, fiercely at times, off the ocean. Pushing the tide unnaturally high, and blasting the heck out of the prior week's landscape.

At first I thought this meant another bumper crop of debris, fishing rope, boats, you name it. But it wasn't to be. Bay View had been assaulted by forces that can bury 3 feet of fishing rope without a thought.
What do you mean three feet?
Oh, that's what you mean.
It was dumb luck that I found that bit of rope. Most anything else? Blown away or buried deep. In the end, my trash bags were very light.

On December 2, I decided to take another quick swing by. The lay of the land looked much the same. The wind had raised foot-high sand drifts in places. And did other weird things.
Sand blows, but leaf doesn't blow?
When I spotted this leaf, I knew this week's collection would be hopeless. A light, dry leaf didn't blow away, but the sand did blow across and nearly cover it. WTH?

A short walk up Zones N & S proved I was right. Very little debris to be found. Not that it wasn't there, just that it couldn't be seen.

So, a collection of Zone N:
37 finds:
  • Building materials: 3 (2 fence slats, 1 chunk of asphalt)
  • Foam/Styrofoam: 6 (inc. a piece from the boat insulation)
  • Fishing misc.: 8 (7 scraps of rope, 1 claw band)
  • Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle caps)
  • Food-related metal/glass: 4 (aluminum can, can scrap, 2 bits of sea glass)
  • Non-food/unknown plastics: 11 (3 scraps of packaging, 2 bits of grocery bags, 3 hard plastic scraps, 1 scrap of boundary tape, 1 tiny bit of balloon, 1 sm. red hard plastic bit)
  • Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
  • Paper/wood: 0
  • Misc./unique: 2 (scrap of fabric, freshly-lost tennis ball (dog toy?))
A bunch of usual suspects. Though, to be honest, 37 is more than I thought I'd collected. It doesn't take long to add up.

On to Zone S:
18 finds:
  • Building materials: 2 (fence slat, chunk of asphalt)
  • Foam/Styrofoam: 4
  • Fishing misc.: 4 (shotgun shell wadding, 2 bits of rope, claw band)
  • Food-related plastics: 0
  • Food-related metal/glass: 0
  • Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (bag scrap, green soldier, tampon applicator, bandaid, tie-band, clear scrap, green scrap, yellow scrap)
  • Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
  • Paper/wood: 0
  • Misc./unique: 0
Quick closeup of the small, but delightfully varied, non-food plastics:
Would be OK not finding another tampon applicator
So this week, I was well & truly schooled. Nov. 24-25 had put assumptions in my head that didn't last seven days. Which just proves that it might be a bit early for me to be making assumptions. Still, every idea that we get wrong gets us one step closer to getting it right.

Besides, I like a world that's full of surprises.

3 comments:

  1. Harry -

    Great work! I like "would be OK not finding another tampon applicator." No kidding, right? I have a long list of "would be OK not to find..."

    The rope. I found a plastic bag like that recently. Ugh. What lies beneath, right?

    Composing my recycling post now!

    keep it up!
    Sara

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  2. a) I do not understand why plastic tampon applicators are still manufactured when there are so many other, less-plasticky options.

    b) I cannot fathom (no pun intended) how a plastic tampon applicator winds up on a beach.

    c) Is it time to put sat tags on all this stuff as soon as it is in the hands of the consumer, so we can see where it began its journey????

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  3. Re C, I'd -love- to have trackers that could show exactly where some of this stuff starts from! On my own I've looked into RF tags & GPS tags for some drift tests. But always the range is too small or the price is too high. I'm still looking.

    Re A, agree. But we're plastic silly-season right now. -Everything- is plastic, and it's just getting worse. Re B (love the pun), either flushed down the toilet, or blown/pulled out of a trash can. (A 3rd option - applied on the beach, in 30 degree weather - we're just not going to go there.)

    Our city's got a great Web site showing all city services on a map, including storm-drain outlets. One of my plans is to check out some of those outlets and see what household stuff has come out of it.

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