Collection Report July 1, 2011, Part II

Following on from Part I's photoblog, here's what I pulled up from the sands of Bay View beach on July 1. First, Zone N:

243 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (window frame)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 57 (56 scraps, 1 cup)
• Fishing misc.: 22 (7 rope, 9 rope twine, 2 scraps of gear, 4 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (4 bottle caps, spoon, gum, 3 straws, 14 food wrappers)
• Food-related metal/glass: 12 (3 bottle caps, 3 sea glass/scraps, 3 foil wrappers, 2 cans, s'more stick)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 46 (20 bags/scraps, balloon, toy shovel, 6 string/twine, 2 strappings, guitar pick, sewage treatment plant disc, degraded squirt bottle nozzle, 4 scraps <1", 9 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 60 (51 filters, 9 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 18 (cups, napkins, scraps)
• Misc./unique: 4 (shreds of fabric)

A couple of the standouts:

Hundreds of thousands of these little
2" discs remain on the loose

Years' worth of sunshine & waves
to make plastic look like this

More washups from an apparent
May incident in Canadian waters

243 is an awful lot of pieces of garbage. Especially as 85% of it is plastic. And while clearly there's a lot of local garbage now being left, plenty is still washing in with the tides. Bits that have been floating for years, bits that have been floating for maybe just a few weeks. Every day, more joins it. I often wonder how much of Bay View's beachgoer trash washes out with each tide, to mix with the rest of the soup.

So, from Zone N on to Zone S, the quiet zone south of the semi-private area of beach:

60 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12 (scraps)
• Fishing misc.: 15 (3 rope scraps, 7 rope twine, 1 scrap of gear, 2 claw bands, 2 shotgun shells)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (bottle cap, straw, 2 wrapper scraps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (bottle cap, glass scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 13 (bag scrap, balloon, glove, 3 bits of string, 1 strapping, 2 scraps >1", 4 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 13 (10 filters, 2 packaging, 1 lighter)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

A completely different scene in Zone S. Only 1/4 the debris of the northern zone, and a quarter of that was washed-in fishing gear. Clearly either nobody's visiting Zone S now, or the advancing dunes & compressed shore mean that high tides fully scour & wash away a lot of debris. I'm going to have to spend time at Zone S during high tide to see just what's up.

So. One week, 303 new pieces of garbage added to the list. On a quiet shore in Maine.