The Flotsam Diaries

Collection Report Jan 16-17, 2011

2012-02-08T09:53:00.003-05:00

January 16, 2012. 11:35AM, Bay View beach, Saco, Maine, just after high-tide. Winter finally arrived, about two months late for this part of the world. And the previous week had seen some good stormy weather to boot. At about 20 degrees F, "layering" was the word of the day.

On the foreshore, the snow was gone, but a sheet of ice held fresh wrackline -- with its tag-alongs -- in its grip.

This marks the first of a remarkable few weeks at the beach. Not necessarily for the flotsam washed up, but for how shorelines work in winter. Take a look at this pebbly wasteland at the edge of the low-tide terrace.

It turns out, this isn't the usual rocky substrate, revealed by a week of erosion. It's the opposite. Under these pebbles the old sand was one big block of ice, locked firmly in place by winter's descent. All of this rocky debris was hurled violently on top of the old sand layer. By the kind of churning sea that was able to cast offshore oddities like this high up the slope.

Tossed it back in, maybe still alive

Thousands of tube-worm casts
amid the rock & shell

The sea made a bed of offshore flotsam and left it high & dry once the tide receded. I even found a pebble that was completely encrusted with barnacles. These rocks aren't local substrate; they're seafloor rocks (and even one oyster shell -- my first at Bayview) from out beyond the tide line that the previous week's weather hurled up.

Proof that when you freeze a shoreline, and then throw in a nice churning storm in the mix, you've very much changed the game. Look also at how the ocean left the signature of her wave energy in the pebbles.

What an amazing world.

Anyway, for this day, the ice along the wrack sealed much of the plastic. I got what I could, then returned at low tide on the 17th to collect what had thawed.

So, for Zone N:

66 finds:

Building materials: 16 (10 brick, 2 asphalt, 4 tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 3
Fishing misc.: 14 (11 lobster trap vinyl coating scraps, 1 trap scrap, 2 bumpers)
Food-related plastics: 1 (bottle cap o-ring)
Food-related metal/glass: 24 (bottlecap, 23 seaglass!)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
Paper/wood: 3 (napkin scraps)
Misc./unique: 0

Almost everything that came up -- and stayed up -- was heavy or dense or friction-y. Tile, brick, sharp snaggy shards of lobster trap vinyl. Light, blowy plastics were limited to 3 tiny flecks of foam that got tangled into the wrack. And look at this, 23 sea glass, that's a record.

Just a wild week that brought up stuff from very unusual places on the seabed.

Here's Zone S:

45 finds:

Building materials: 9 (7 brick, 1 asphalt, 1 tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 4
Fishing misc.: 7 (4 trap vinyl coatings, 1 bumper, 2 claw bands)
Food-related plastics: 2 (bottlecap o-rings)
Food-related metal/glass: 11 (1 can scrap, 1 pulltab, 2 bottlecaps, 7 seaglass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 6 (3 scraps <1", tieback, rubberband, carabiner?)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 5 (leather sole, leather punchout, 2 rag scraps, buried fencing)

The same story here as Zone N. Heavy stuff, weird stuff. Seafloor stuff. Including this bizarre frozen arachnid...

...which turned out to be mangled chainlink fencing.

So a week not notable for how much washed in, but for what it was and where it came from. The sudden onset of winter froze the beach in place. And that seems to have set in motion many weeks of odd behavior -- which I've been able to catalog.

Stay tuned!

It's a Small World After All

2012-02-04T18:33:00.005-05:00

Plastic. Bought locally. Acting globally.

Here's Mexico, Denmark, Oman, Serbia, India, and Cyprus.

Here's the USA west coast, England, USA east coast, Norway, Bali, and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

This is Lebanon, the Atlantic island of Cape Verde, Tanzania, Australia, China, and Peru.

This list could cycle through every nation, every province, every state, every city. In the entire world. Everywhere that plastic has reached -- including many deserted lands where it shouldn't have reached -- the world has been changed.

Maybe in some parts of the world we can still ignore it, or pretend it's not a problem, or that it'll just go away.

But who's kidding -- There is no "away."

So what do we do? Simple. We fix it. Or we drown in it.

Transatlantic Connections - Part I: Lobster Trap Tags

2012-01-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

After nearly two years, there's plenty I'm still learning. But one thing is sure. The same oceans that divide us, connect us. In the Pacific, the currents tie East to West and West to East. The Atlantic, thanks to the Gulf Stream, is more of a one-way street, North America ---> Europe.

Plastics from my part of the world can make the 3,000-mile crossing unscathed, washing up on Irish & British shores. Many bear marks that identify what they were, where they came from, and even when. Each is a time capsule and a fabulous source of information, and stories. If one knows what to look for!

So here's the first in a series of pages dedicated to long-distance plastic debris. Stuff that could start in the Gulf of Maine, wash up on an Irish or British beach, and be found.

Lobster Trap Tags

Gulf of Maine lobster trap tags are a common find on beaches in Maine. And, it turns out, far from Maine. Lobstering is an enormous & highly regulated local industry. By law, all lobster traps must have one of these colorful little strips attached to it.

Trap tags are color-coded by year. The tags above are the colors used in Maine from 1997 (top) through 2010 (bottom).

Each tag is stamped with owner's license, federal fishing zone, trap #, state/province, year, and region. So, for example, the green one is 6841 A1 0789 ME 09 Z:G EEZ. 6841 is the owner's license; A1 is the national region (basically coastal Maine); 0789 is the trap number; ME 09 is Maine 2009 season; Z:G is Maine's "G" zone (the most southwesterly; with A being the most northeasterly); and EEZ meaning the trap can be set out in deeper water several miles offshore.

(Tags from other states & Canada use varied color schemes. Also, Maine has some anomalies. The bottom tag says "NC," which means non-commercial -- this is a recreational fisherman who's allowed to have only 5 pots in the water at one time.)

In season, there can be several million lobster traps in the water. Tags break free from traps all the time. They're buoyant, and many find & ride the Gulf Stream to Ireland and the UK. Rik Bennett was combing his beach in Wales in 2010 when he stumbled upon this one:

Not bad for 3 years at sea

More recently, Andy Goodall from Newquay, Cornwall, UK discovered this Newfoundland, Canada specimen in December 2011:

Stunning shape for maybe 12 years at sea!

And last but not least, an amazing story of connections across 3,000 miles and 20 years. Rosemary Hill lives Waterville, County Kerry, Ireland. Walking the beach last year, she stumbled upon a tag. Not the colorful annual band, but a separate permanent tag that IDs the owner more thoroughly.

On a hunch, she decided to see if she could find the owner. And she did, through his son's FaceBook page. This tag, belonging to a Massachusetts fisherman, was on a trap lost in the "Perfect Storm" of 1991! After an incredible journey, it washed up on Irish shores. And a transatlantic connection was formed, reported in both European and American newspapers.

Plastic is forever. And that's bad news. But if it's out there in the ocean already, and it has stories to tell, isn't it nice to be able to tell them? Keep your eyes open; you never know what you may find!

Collection Report Jan 9, 2012

2012-01-21T08:22:00.001-05:00

Monday, January 9, 2:30PM. Bright sun. Mild offshore breeze, chill in the air. 3 hrs after high-tide.

If you can call it a high-tide. This was the weakest tide I've ever seen at Bay View in 1 1/2 years of wandering it. Unsurprisingly, with no energy, no tides, and offshore winds, little washed up again. Actually, less than little.

Zone N:

12 finds:

Building materials: 5 (4 brick, 1 asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 0
Fishing misc.: 1
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (baggie - not shown, black tape, 2 scraps >1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Zone S:

6 finds:

Building materials: 5 (2 asphalt, 3 brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 0
Fishing misc.: 0
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (glass bottle scrap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Take away the asphalt & brick, and there's nothing. On a hunch, I took a walk about 1/5 mile farther south than the southern edge of Zone S. This is an area that I've never collected, but have always anecdotally noted junk lying amid its wrack. This day? Nothing. Not one speck of seaweed or manmade debris. Not even a cigarette butt. Current conditions have pushed & blown everything that was on the sand back into the blue and kept more from washing up.

The perfect culmination of six weeks of truly "bizarre weather," as a NOAA oceanographer I'm in touch with has called it. By the end of the first week in January 2012, over 1000 all-time January heat records had broken. The jet stream, which usually dips deeply into the US from Canada, spent week after week riding high up in Canada. Could I be seeing a small part of the bigger story here on my little stretch of beach?

Anyway. Weirdness. But fun to be seeing it & adding it to the record.

Collection Report Jan 2, 2012

2012-01-18T22:09:00.000-05:00

Happy January. January 2, 11:30AM.

The new year picked up where December left off. Ridiculously warm, sunny, busy, and not at all winter-like. And the coastal weirdness continued as well -- a weird flux of dead seas, dogwalkers, offshore winds, seafloor rocks/shells, and almost zero surface flotsam of any kind.

One of the few bits of debris this week; the "wrackline" is just
dried reeds blown down from the dunes

Straight into it. Zone N:

35 finds:

Building materials: 12 (5 asphalt, 5 brick, 1 tile, 1 roof shingle)
Foam/Styrofoam: 4
Fishing misc.: 3 (rope scrap, trap runner -- put in trash at beach, trap bumper)
Food-related plastics: 1 (straw wrapper)
Food-related metal/glass: 4 (3 cap scraps, bottlecap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (o-ring, baggie scrap)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (3 cigarettes, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 1 (wood chunk)
Misc./unique: 3 (2 leather shoe soles, rubber scrap)

Zone S:

15 finds:

Building materials: 4 (3 asphalt, 1 concrete)
Foam/Styrofoam: 6
Fishing misc.: 1 (rope scrap)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can scrap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 1 (rubber glove)

The dream continues.

Hunger

2012-01-12T12:14:00.001-05:00

In Tolkien's Silmarillion -- the backstory mythology to the Lord of the Rings -- there is the tale of Ungoliant, one of the original "gods" who came to earth, and turned to evil.

"Melkor Calls Forth Ungoliant" by
renowned artist John Howe

Ungoliant took the form of an enormous black spider, and she began spinning & weaving webs to catch light. She hungered for light. She devoured & consumed it. Everywhere on earth that she roamed, she consumed. And yet her hunger grew, and grew. She even entered the Blessed Realm and devoured the very light of the Two Trees of Valinor, and cast darkness across the realm.

But she wasn't satisfied. Grown horrible in size & might, she kept on consuming -- loving light & hating it wherever she found it. Eventually, she holed up in dark mountains of the mortal world. There, she spun webs through the long years, and consumed, and darkness spread out in all directions.

And she bred offspring, huge beasts of terror and evil. When her offspring grew of age, she mated with them, and hungered for them, and consumed them.

Eventually she had no more mates, and no more offspring. There was no more light, no more food. And yet her hunger still grew. Never satisfied, never fulfilled, always growing. Finally, in the end, sitting in absolute darkness and doubled over with hunger, she consumed herself.

The image above, linked from Inhabitat, was created three years ago by artist & filmmaker Chris Jordan of Midway Journey fame. It consists of 2.4 million individual scraps of plastic, all pulled from the Pacific Ocean. 2,400,000 is a significant number: it represented (at the time) how many pounds of plastic were estimated to be entering the oceans of the world every hour.

Do you think that rate has gone down, or up, since then?

Collection Report Dec. 26, 2011

2012-01-06T15:25:00.001-05:00

Another Christmas come & gone.

Why was this a good idea again?

Anyway! Presents, smiles, family time. Coffee & sweets. A beautiful day & beautiful time of year. I hope you and yours -- however you celebrate "The Holidays" -- enjoyed them.

Back to reality. Monday, December 26 had me at the beach again. 2:30PM. A couple hours after high-tide on this bright, blue, 40-something degree day.

I say, "back to reality." But the shoreline still lives in its December-long dream. As you can see, aside from the tiniest dusting of snow and maybe a cracked clam shell or two, nothing new seems to have arrived onshore for yet another week. It was another week of offshore winds and weak tides. A warm, dry, strange December.

Here's a closer look. Zone N:

29 finds:

Building materials: 8 (5 asphalt, 2 brick, 1 slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 4
Fishing misc.: 4 (2 rope threads, claw band, tiny vinyl trap coating scrap)
Food-related plastics: 1 (torn food package end)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can, foil wrapper)
Nonfood-unknown plastics: 4 (empty dog waste bag, bottle cap from liquid soap bottle, 1 scrap >1", 1 scrap < 1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 1 (rubber stopper)

Not much to say about this. The dog bag probably blew out of someone's jacket pocket when they weren't looking. I do wonder about the soap bottle cap??

Quickly over to Zone S:

7 finds:

Building materials: 4 (3 asphalt chunks, 1 roofing scrap)
Foam/Styrofoam: 1
Fishing misc.: 2 (1 rope scrap, 1 piece trap vinyl coating)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood-unknown plastics: 0
Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

That's as close to zero as I'll probably ever get. (And hooray, no personal care products!)

So. Winds, tides, currents -- some or all of these kept almost all flotsam, organic & otherwise, from Bay View throughout the whole of December. Looking back to last year at this time, the beach was an utter nightmare. I'm not complaining about how 2011 bowed out. Besides, it all helps add to the record of how the ocean & shoreline ecosystem works here in my little corner of the world.

But I know that, as with all dreamers & dreams, Bay View will wake up again one day. And remember what's happening in the Gulf of Maine. I'm not looking forward to the stark reminder.

Collection Report Dec 19, 2011

2012-01-04T12:35:00.002-05:00

Monday, December 19. 1PM, an hour after high-tide. Sun & thin clouds, a chilly day with a dusting of morning frost at the wrack line.

Well, what passed for a wrack line. Seems like yet another week with no energy bringing anything in from the ocean. (Organic or otherwise.) And the evidence showed more offshore winds -- all the old twigs & leaves high up against the dunes had been blown down to the tide line. Presumably much of whatever washed in was blown & pushed back out too.

So a quick day at the beach. Leaving me to marvel at icy ghosts:

A message from the dawn, blown who-knows-where by the time I arrived.

On to the (very brief) specifics. Zone N:

30 finds:

Building materials: 4 (3 asphalt, 1 tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 6
Fishing misc.: 1 (tiny rope scrap)
Food-related plastics: 1 (Pringles can seal)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (tampon, bandaid, scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 13
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Again, so few things. Why did one have to be so gross? As for the cigarettes, as before they were mostly clustered up near the access point by the drift-log that seems to collect & shelter them. A few fresh, most older.

A quick hit over to Zone S, which was equally thrilling:

17 finds:

Building materials: 5 (asphalt chunks)
Foam/Styrofoam: 2
Fishing misc.: 3 (rope, 2 claw bands)
Food-related plastics: 2 (fork scrap, straw wrapper)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (black tape, tennis ball, 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 1 (yarn)

December's pattern is nice. If deceiving. But what does it mean? Did this part of the Gulf of Maine divest itself heavily back in November? Are December's currents pulling material offshore? Is the offshore wind as big a factor as it seems? I wish I knew.

In the meantime, big news for TFD. Curtis Cove in Biddeford, an untouristed end-of-the-road spot and major collection point for seaborne garbage, is now under the protection of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. I met with them in November, and they've given me a year's access to the Cove to explore & collect washed-in debris there. Much work, that. But probably some great insights into the true nature & extent of what's out there fouling the Gulf of Maine. Look forward to some new collection reports in the new year!

Changing the Game: A Resolution or Three

2011-12-31T15:14:00.002-05:00

Can't believe another year has come and gone. As something of a summary of all I've learned & studied over the past two years, I sent in an op-ed to Maine's largest newspaper, The Portland Press Herald this week. And it was published today! (Text below if the link isn't working.)

Toothbrushes, golf balls, glue-sticks, pacifiers, lip balm, kids’ toys, deodorant roller balls, combs, printer cartridges, pens & markers, pregnancy tests, clothes pins.These are just some of the ordinary plastic household items found inside the stomachs of dead albatross on Midway, a remote island chain in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Every year, thousands of albatross die from consuming plastics that have floated in on the waves. Midway lies 1200 miles from civilization.This is just one heartbreaking -- and completely predictable -- result of a plasticized global culture.By now most people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- the swirl of plastics floating in the deep ocean, far from land. Midway and Kamilo Beach, Hawaii are its poster children. But what most people don’t know is that this garbage patch isn’t alone. Every ocean in the world now has plastic swirling in it. There’s plastic in the Sargasso Sea. Plastic washes up on the Azores. 80% of Arctic fulmars have plastic in their bellies. Islands and inlets around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are choked with it. It’s everywhere.Including the Maine coast. Plastic comes onshore with every tide. I’ve studied flotsam at Bay View beach in Saco for the past year and a half. The realities are sobering. Tampon applicators, a hypodermic needle, sauce packets, squirt nozzles, combs, car seat vinyl, a plasticized menu from a defunct Bar Harbor restaurant -- thousands of pieces, in one small stretch of one beach. Many with obvious fish bite marks. Elsewhere it’s the same story. Lubec has plastic amid its coastal rocks. Otter Cove in Acadia National Park has plastic in it. Curtis Cove in Biddeford collects so much that there is literally plastic every step of the way.How could this happen?How could it not? We have filled our households and our lives with stuff we use for a month or a day or five minutes, but which persists for a dozen lifetimes. The average American goes through 220 lbs. of plastic a year. Garbage has always escaped from the waste stream. It always will. Despite our best efforts. (Not to mention from windstorms, floods, and worse disasters.) Now that most garbage is plastic, every escapee adds to the persistent fouling of our shores & waters.Nothing eats plastic, nothing biodegrades it. Those K-cups, straws, toothpaste tubes, grocery bags, takeout boxes, single-serve sauce packs, disposable razors -- they don’t go away. (Cigarette butts either. They’re plastic -- you knew that, right?) Every piece of plastic that’s escaped a hand, bag, dumpster, trash truck, landfill, or recycling plant still exists, even if crumbled into small bits beyond recognition. Each will foul a shore, collect toxins, or kill a sea creature. It’s what they do.Columbia University calculates that at least 73 million lbs. of plastic now floats in the world’s oceans. (That doesn’t count denser plastics that sink.) That’s what we’ve managed to do, in just two generations.Recycling is often touted as an answer. But true one-to-one plastic recycling is extremely hard, expensive -- and rare. Most recycled plastic is just downcycled at best, and ever more virgin plastic is required to restock store shelves. Worse, most plastic that the U.S. recycles gets dumped on China, to be turned into packaging & cheap consumer goods for our big box stores. Have you noticed that everything in our households is plastic now? Thank the huge glut of material that we’ve dutifully recycled and turned into an ultra-cheap resource.Besides, recycling rhetoric overlooks the obvious: plastic blows out of recycling bins, recycling trucks, and recycling centers just as easily as trash cans and landfills.So, how do we clean up the ocean and get a fresh start? How do we ensure that our children will enjoy clean shores like our grandparents did? We don’t. There is no “plastic magnet.” There’s no vacuum that will suck up plastic but spare the planktonic base of the global food web. In time, the ocean may spit its filth back onshore for us to collect and dispose of properly. But that only works if we stop force-feeding her. And that will only happen if we commit to using less plastic & wasting less plastic.Plastics certainly have their benefits and their place. But our gross overuse of them has polluted nearly every last pristine, remote place left in the world. As well as our own back yard. It’s time to change the game.

It's certainly been a strange road since picking up my first bag of beached garbage back in March 2010. But a good one.
For 2012, I have three resolutions:

Pick up more flotsam from Maine shores.
Learn more about how it's getting there and how to stop it.
Share more of what I learn.

#1 is already a given. I just got clearance from the National Fish & Wildlife Service to do weekly cleanups at a protected beach called Curtis Cove in Biddeford:

It's an utterly untouristed little gravelly crescent that's a major catch basin for tons of oceanic plastic garbage. In 2012, in addition to Bay View in Saco, I'm going to be collecting regularly at Curtis Cove, where all the junk I find will be seaborne -- not local drops by beachgoers. For someone looking to learn exactly what and how much is out there in the Gulf of Maine, it's hard to do better than this!
So with Resolution #1 settled, it's up to me to make #2 and #3 happen. And I intend to keep my promise.
From my family to yours, may I wish you all a peaceful, healthy, and very Happy New Year!

Collection Report Dec 12, 2011

2011-12-28T21:29:00.003-05:00

Monday, December 12. 1:42 PM, chilly & bright with a dazzling low sun, and a light breeze from the SW. A little more than an hour after high-tide -- if it could actually be called "high tide." The tideline was barely above the terrace, a sign of a remarkably feeble & low-energy week.

The weak waves preserved a slightly trampled message from the night before.

Ryan + Harry. Awwww...

A nice display of youthful enthusiasm, the perfect tonic to my first beach collection as a middle-aged 40-year-old! I wish good things to Ryan & her Harry.

As expected, cold skies & subdued tides brought in only the slightest flotsam. So why did one of the few pieces have to be another one of these?

Enough already!

Down to the numbers. Zone N:

28 finds:

Building materials: 6 (3 asphalt, brick, tile, fence slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 5
Fishing misc.: 3 (rope)
Food-related plastics: 3 (1 bottlecap o-ring, 2 food wrapper scraps)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scrap, sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (tampon applicator, 1 scrap >1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

It seems that November's beachings combined with December's weak waves have left Bay View with a little breathing room. More weeks like this would be nice!

On to Zone S:

6 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 0
Fishing misc.: 3 (2 scraps of lobster trap vinyl coating, claw band)
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

Yes. More weeks like this would be nice.

I'm writing this on December 28, a couple weeks after the fact. Last night a major gale blew through southern Maine, knocking over a few smaller trees and toppling recycling bins & trash cans. I wonder what the beach looks like right now?

Collection Report Dec 5, 2011

2011-12-27T13:14:00.000-05:00

With Christmas & Hannukah festivities now fading into the past, it's time to play catch-up with these collection reports. So, Monday, December 5. 12:15, low tide, light breeze, & a glimmering terrace as the sun peeked through partly cloudy skies.

A fairly low-energy week judging by the lack of wrack. But, this was the week where the personal became the very public.

Happy news? Or sad?

Don't. Flush. Plastics.

My first hypodermic; needle intact

I'd be just as glad to go another year & a half until the next hypodermic. This one clearly came from the sea -- it was faded, cracked, abraded. One wonders what its story was -- a hospital, home health care, back alley? One shouldn't need safety gloves to dig in the sand.

Anyway, on to Zone N:

74 finds:

Building materials: 7 (6 asphalt, 1 roof tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 14
Fishing misc.: 7 (5 rope scraps, vinyl trap coating scrap, claw band)
Food-related plastics: 3 (food wrapper, straw wrapper, silverware scrap)
Food-related metal/glass: 6 (aluminum can, glass bottle, 4 sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 6 (tampon applicator, hypodermic, pregnancy test, bandaid, 1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 25 (23 filters, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 3 (2 food wrappers, scrap)
Misc./unique: 3 (iron fence hook, 2 flip-flops)

Many of the cigarettes were old and had been kicked around for months (or years?). They collect up in the little nook by the access point where a large drift-log makes a shelter from the wind.

The personal care products are troubling. Not least of which because at least the needle & applicator could have come from anywhere from Halifax, Nova Scotia down to Boston. Or even farther south. How do you stop it if you can't tell where it started? It's everybody's problem... which I guess means anybody, anywhere could start being the solution, right?

Zone S:

24 finds:

Building materials: 6 (5 asphalt, 1 brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 2
Fishing misc.: 5 (rope scrap, 3 vinyl trap coatings, claw band)
Food-related plastics: 1 (wrapper scrap)
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (balloon string, 1 scrap >1", 2 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 3
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 2 (fabric pieces)

Take away the asphalt chunks and cigarettes, and this was a light week. Number-wise. I refuse to call finding a used tampon applicator and a sharp syringe "a good day." Your mileage may vary.

Collection Report Nov 28, 2011

2011-12-21T07:02:00.000-05:00

Monday, November 28. 10:00AM. Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. Temp in the 50s. Overcast with occasional sun. Like, well, this:

A weird day. The kind of day where the sea has left behind rock gardens:

The purses of mermaids:

The homes of tubeworms:

As well as two horses and a rider with a fuzzy hat??

Then, of course, the usual:

So, what came out of the sand, all told? Zone N:

134 finds:

Building materials: 4 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 62 (!!)
Fishing misc.: 5 (2 shotgun shells, claw band, 2 bits of fishing line)
Food-related plastics: 8 (3 bottle-cap o-rings, 3 food wrappers/scraps, 2 gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 5 (bottle cap, 2 foil wrappers, 2 sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 17 (o-ring, plastic hairband, plastic glove, bandaid, 2 wall anchors, kids shirt tag, rubberband, 2 scraps >1", 7 scraps < 1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 32
Paper/wood: 1 (wood firecracker stick)
Misc./unique: 0

This was the week for foam! See the riot of deadly color:

What I discovered this week is that the little protected corner near the access point is a real collection spot. There's an old log there, and the windward side amasses all kinds of seaweed, reeds, leaves, and plastic -- mostly light stuff like cigarette butts &, well, styrofoam. And now on to Zone S:

22 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 3
Fishing misc.: 3 (1 rope scrap - natural fiber, 2 vinyl coating)
Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle, pepper packet)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 9 (baggie, strapping, folding step!, 6 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

This, obviously, is the most interesting find:

Not least because I had no idea what it was, until a quick FaceBook "crowdsourcing." Flotsam Diaries fan Irene Parsons knew right away: the top of a folding step-stool! How it got to Bay View, with oceanic algae attached, I'll never really know.

My big takeaway for the week: If you don't know, ask. There's probably someone who does!

Hope, Despair, and that Strange Place In-Between

2011-12-14T09:27:00.000-05:00

People ask me, as I explain my passion, "What hope do you have to change things?" I tell them the truth. I have little. The problem is vast, the politicians are feckless, corporate interests are rich & entrenched. And the 100% predictable result has already happened.

Tromsø, Norway; 200 miles north of
the Arctic Circle (photo: Bo Eide*)

So. Hope? No. Not really.

Then why keep picking litter off the beach, writing stories, trying? Because there's a difference between losing hope and giving in to despair. Despair is paralysis. Despair is also extremely arrogant -- it presumes that we can know with certainty that our actions are useless. Despair is Denethor, throwing himself onto a pyre rather than face a future that to him can only be black & bleak.

I'd rather cast in my lot with Theoden, riding headlong into overwhelming odds because it's simply the right thing to do.

That sounds like bluster. But, in truth, it's the opposite. It's deep humility. For all that I think I know, and think I've learned, I don't know how the story ends. So I do what I do because I love my daughter and I think the world is beautiful and I want to preserve it. It's my path.

And there is a strange freedom & clarity that comes from leaving both hope & despair behind. It's re-energizing. "Hoping" puts the burden on someone else. "Doing" puts the burden -- the control -- in my own hands. So no, I can't change the world. But I can change my part of it. And no, I can't make it better forever. But I can make it better for today. This one moment when the beach is deserted and the gulls are crying and the surf is pounding and the breeze is carrying salt on the air... and the sand is clean.

And it just might stay clean long enough for the next lonely wanderer to look down. And notice.

Sometimes, the point isn't to do the right thing because you hope or think something awesome will come from it. It's because, it's the right thing. And because "even the wise cannot see all ends." As I've witnessed, the actions of one person have a funny way of reaching beyond them in ways & times most unexpected.

I have ideas, plans, contacts, and goals for 2012. I'm going to expand my work, meet new people, do what I can, and increase what I can do. Not because I have hope, but because I don't despair.

* For more images in and around Tromsø, please check out Bo Eide's fabulous blog: Life Up North; this image (saved originally from Facebook) comes from this post: http://lifeupnorth.posterous.com/collecting-marine-litter-above-the-arctic-cir

Working Together, Apart

2011-12-07T13:47:00.001-05:00

I was recently talking with another Mainer who lives a bit further south than I. She also picks up garbage on her beach. On her way back home one morning, she drove by a man wandering down the country lane. He too was picking up litter along the roadside. That roadside's gullies drain to the ocean & her beach. His time & work meant less garbage for her to pick up "downstream," and more time to enjoy the beauty of the place.

The tragedy is, there are no pristine coasts left in the world. Man-made debris has reached every corner. 80% of it is plastic, so it will be there beyond all of our lifetimes. But once in a while, you may still stumble upon a scene that looked like it once did. "In the quiet of the world," as my hero Tolkien would have put it. It's not because that place has escaped the indignities we've dumped on it. It's because somebody else has been there before you, and taken their time to make it better. Even if just for a while.

I was touched by the story of the beach and the road. The idea that a kindness done may trickle down & reach someone beyond your thought. It put in mind a work by another of my literary heroes, Robert Frost. His "The Tuft of Flowers" brings the point beautifully home. I reproduce it here in full, borrowing the wording from the Web site "Representative Poetry Online."

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,--alone,

`As all must be,' I said within my heart,

`Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

`Whether they work together or apart.'

Never think any of your actions are in vain. You may not even have the faintest idea whose world you're making better in doing them.

Collection Report Nov 21, 2011

2011-12-02T11:29:00.001-05:00

Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. Monday, November 21, 1:15PM. Low-tide, chilly & windy.

A bright day, a quiet week, an absolutely deserted beach. On Thanksgiving, I wrote the prelude to this report. After a summer filled with the usual thoughtlessness, and a late October/early November filled with much sea-borne junk, a day like this is just what this Flotsam Diarist needed.

A very quick report here. Zone N:

21 finds:

Building materials: 2 (1 asphalt chunk, 1 brick scrap)
Foam/Styrofoam: 2
Fishing misc.: 1 (rope)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (foil wrapper)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (bag scrap, 2 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 12
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Lose the ubiquitous plastic poison packets known as cigarette butts, and this is just remarkable.

Zone S:

6 finds:

Building materials: 2 (asphalt chunks)
Foam/Styrofoam: 0
Fishing misc.: 1 (claw band)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (scrap >1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Even more remarkable.

Takeaway? A simple one: This was a good day.

Collection Report Nov 14, 2011

2011-12-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

Finding myself playing catchup again with older collection reports. So, Monday, Nov. 14, 9:00AM. Sunny, calm, pleasant. Much like the whole week.

One of the week's high tides had pushed Nov. 7's wrack line up toward the dune. But it left little in its wake. As it turned out, my morning stroll was so quick -- and dull -- I only took two other pictures. Sadly, a blurry seagull and a burnt log aren't exactly blog-worthy.

So without further ado, straight into the numbers. Zone N:

48 finds:

Building materials: 12 (7 asphalt, 3 brick, 1 tile, 1 fence slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 6
Fishing misc.: 4 (2 rope scraps, lobster claw band, tiny buoy scrap)
Food-related plastics: 5 (2 straws, 2 wrappers, bottlecap safety seal)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scrap, bottlecap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (rubberband)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 14
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 4 (fabric scrap, 3 wax candles)

Take away the rubble and the cigarettes, and this was a light, light day.

Zone S:

36 finds:

Building materials: 8 (7 asphalt, 1 brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 7
Fishing misc.: 8 (4 rope bits, vinyl trap coating scrap, 3 claw bands)
Food-related plastics: 1 (chewing gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (hairclip, nonfood bottlecap, 3 scraps >1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

And again, very quiet.

The lesson I take from this week is one I learned back in early spring. After the ocean purges, it actually does get briefly cleaner. The massive purges of Oct. 31 and Nov. 7 seem to have given Bay View a little respite now. How long will/did it last? Keep reading.

Collection Report Nov 7, 2011

2011-11-25T20:57:00.000-05:00

Nov 7, 1:30PM, an hour or so before low tide. Bright, low sun. Long, moody shadows. A beautiful day for a walk on the beach.

And all of 30 seconds into the day, I could tell some weirdness was afoot.

I've seen the ocean pull together these interesting mounds of rock & cobble down in the southern part of my walk before. But never up on the northern end. It's always a thrill, witnessing nature cull & arrange perfect piles of stone. Only to blow them all apart with the next tide.

Along with the stone was a colorful array of bone, shell, deep/coldwater coral shards...

And plastic cats?

This was an amazing day. Not just for how much debris washed up, but for where it washed up. Here's Zone N:

46 finds:

Building materials: 19 (9 asphalt chunks, 6 brick, 4 tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 1
Fishing misc.: 4 (trap vinyl coating scraps)
Food-related plastic: 2 (wrappers)
Food-related metal/glass: 8 (2 can scraps, 6 sea glass)
Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (3 plastic hairbands, button, toy cat, vinyl scrap, 2 strapping)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
Paper/wood: 2 (paper scrap, wood firecracker stick)
Misc./unique: 2 (glass bead, leather scrap)

This is not the amazing bit. For that, we quickly turn to Zone S:

189 finds:

Building materials: 14 (4 asphalt, 3 brick, 3 shingles, 3 wood stakes, plywood chip)
Foam/Styrofoam: 1
Fishing misc.: 72 (4 rope scraps, 30 vinyl trap scraps, 34 claw bands!, shotgun shell, 3 trap bumpers)
Food-related plastic: 13 (2 bottlecap liners, cup top, cup scrap, 3 gum, 3 silverware, 3 wrappers)
Food-related metal/glass: 11 (4 bottle caps, foil, 6 seaglass)
Non-food/unknown plastics: 59 (balloon, 3 hairbands, bandaid, 5 plastic wrap, 4 tape scraps, 4 strapping, 7 vinyl shards, bow, firecracker, clothes tag, 14 scraps >1", 17 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 9 (8 filters, 1 filter tip)
Paper/wood: 1 (paper air filter)
Misc./unique: 9 (crayon tip, aluminum scrap, 5 fabric pieces, 2 gloves)

Wow. Never has Zone S quadrupled Zone N. Not in 17 months. With a dizzying array of finds, mostly all tossed back from the sea, wrecked & ruined. From:

Ancient & grotty lobster claw bands

To:

Fish-nibbled balloon

To:

Truth in advertising

And the oddest thing about all of this junk (from both zones)? Look:

Minus a couple local food wrappers, it all sinks. Every piece that washed up this week is denser than seawater. It all once littered the seafloor. From there, currents & tides dragged it along rock, over silt, through weed. Until finally hurling the bits up onshore, along with shell & bone & stone. Crazy. Especially since Weather Underground's historical data for the week shows offshore breezes, the tide chart shows weak tides, and the local NOAA buoy also shows winds & surface currents moving offshore. What's happening on the ocean bottom often bears no relationship to what's happening just a few meters above.

One for the books, that's for sure. (And maybe a little background for why Nov. 21's walk put me in a more thankful frame of mind.) My takeaway? Whether the discarded plastics of our modern world float, or sink, they still pollute. And very rarely do any of them ever go "away."

Thankful

2011-11-23T21:31:00.001-05:00

A year and a half into the Diaries, I admit that a certain gloom has been creeping in lately. So many bags of garbage, so many news accounts of declining seas & shores. Too much plastic junk, and still more being churned out every day.

So this past Monday when I hit the beach, a pall hung over my thoughts.

Which is why what I found was such a startling, beautiful surprise. Here is the grand total of debris from 500 feet of beachfront for the week:

Barely two dozen pieces. Take away the rock, glass (and of course the infernal cigarettes), and last week the sea washed up a grand total of 9 tiny things.

It was a clean beach. The kind my ancestors would have enjoyed -- probably never imagining any other kind. It was the brief vision of a future that my daughter and all of the next generations deserve. One that's worth fighting for. The kind of day where you truly could forget the modern world. See the gorgeous ripples of outflow at the far end of the low-tide terrace:

Study the beautiful striations running the length of sun-bleached driftwood:

And admire the geometric artwork left behind by a few errand-running gulls:

I know it's fleeting. I know the challenges & the realities. To borrow Tolkien, "The land dreams in a false peace." But for the glimpse & reminder of what that peace could actually look like, I'm grateful. And thankful.

Captain Charles Moore's New Book, "Plastic Ocean"

2011-11-14T21:11:00.001-05:00

I first learned of Captain Charles Moore in a Discovery Channel documentary in 2009. He was strolling the plastic sand at Hawaii's infamous Kamilo Beach, exposing the realities of a plastic society. Since then, he and the pioneering work of his non-profit, Algalita Marine Research Foundation, have loomed large in the back of my mind & in my efforts. It looms still larger, now that I've just finished his brand-new "Plastic Ocean" (with collaborator Cassandra Phillips).

"Plastic Ocean" is something of an enigma -- as I imagine Capt. Moore to be. It's part personal narrative, part adventure tale, part history/science lecture, part manifesto. It follows no real chronology. But it thinks big. In it, Moore cuts a broad (and occasionally deep) swath through the invention of plastics, methods of plastic production, international treaties on plastic dumping, scientific literature listing the ills of plastic, collaborations with scientists & artists, joint ventures, a walk-through of how a scientific paper gets into peer-reviewed journals. And he sums it up with a clarion call for a complete rethinking of what it means for a society to be prosperous and successful.

No small work, this.

Its 337 pages take the reader through turbulent swells, doldrums blazing with hot sun and heavy air, refreshing dips in clear lagoons. An occasional statement threatens to capsize the whole thing. (He cites the "100,000 animals killed each year" figure, which has been floating around as an untested number since 1984. He also raises the spectre of plastic pellets being used to fatten cattle, although various searches reveal only a grainy newspaper article from 1971 about this being tried.) Yet somehow it all works, and the pages keep turning.

In the end, this is a love story. A vision & memory of wide seas, roaring surf, sparkling beaches. Simpler times and tastes, before the throwaway world, when people made crafts -- and crafted things were built to last. Every good love story has its crisis. And of course the crisis here is plastic waste, and its attendant soup of toxic chemicals that foul seas, beaches, & marine life. But plastic itself is not the villain. Cheap, disposable plastics and the companies who shamelessly make, promote, and defend them in spite of mounting evidence of their harm -- these cast the shadow across this text. Moore has no love for the American Chemistry Council or bottling giant Coca-Cola. He has little patience for organizations who receive large checks from them and still profess to be seriously working on the problem of plastic pollution.

Moore also devotes many pages to exposing the still-growing destruction caused by fishing debris -- decimated coral reefs, dead & injured sea creatures, hazards to shipping & sailing. (The latter of which he experienced first-hand and recounts vividly.) He shows convincingly that international treaties such as MARPOL Annex V (1988) are toothless tigers, flouted by many rogue fishing fleets still today.

"Plastic Ocean" is literally chock-a-bloc with facts and figures. Sadly, with no footnotes it's hard for a reader to take further steps to delve into these figures themselves. (It does contain a well-stocked general bibliography at the back.) Moore notes this as a conscious choice, but his logic isn't exactly satisfying. Still, this book is a powerful wake-up call to a modern dystopia of our own making. It's a great introduction for people who are just learning of the problem. And even seasoned plastic-pollution fighters will find details & angles that they hadn't considered before.

As the pages turn, and solution after solution is vetted -- and shot down -- the scale of the problem and the need to change the game at the source becomes ever more clear. We cannot quickly clean up the mess we've made. There's no way to do it. We just have to stop adding to it.

Capt. Moore writes, "The seductive idea that the more we consume, the better off we'll be has timed out, and the Plastic Ocean is one of many witnesses to this fact... The ocean planet will thank you if you help end its plastic plague." I can't tell whether he looks to the future with optimism or pessimism. Either way, his words ring true.

Collection Report Oct 31, 2011

2011-11-09T21:44:00.000-05:00

Monday, Oct. 31, 11:00AM. Sunny skies, calm (if chilly) air. Just one day after a very wacky storm.

We actually got off comparatively light here in coastal Maine. Seabreezes kept much of the snow at bay, and quickly melted what did land. But the storm still left its mark. The beach felt like quicksand -- saturated gravel squished underfoot; the heaviest of the gravel slumped down the foreshore and collected at the base of the low-tide terrace. Deep briny pools formed just in front.

Alien landscapes

The weekend's weather brought a carpet of odd flotsam, especially from the sea floor...

Razor clams, slipper shells, and wrack

Of course, amid the shell, wood, rock, and wrack, plenty of bits that had no business being there.

Somewhere, a lobster trap lies rusting

More than plenty. A beach load. Zone N:

155 finds:

Building materials: 20 (8 asphalt chunks, 7 brick, 2 tile, 2 wood, roof shingle scrap)
Foam/Styrofoam: 29
Fishing misc.: 25 (6 rope, 3 claw bands, 14 vinyl trap coating scraps, 2 rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 9 (bottle, 2 bottle caps, "Red Devils" cup scrap, 3 food wrappers, gum, knife)
Food-related metal/glass: 5 (bottle cap, 3 sea glass, foil wrapper)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 33 (cap, flip-flop, glove, 2 firecrackers, shoe-rack hook, Hooksett disc, 7 scraps >1", 19 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 28 (27 filters, Skoal pack)
Paper/wood: 2
Misc./unique: 4 (wire, cloth, leather swatch, sock)

The spike in asphalt & brick is telling. Usually deeply buried by sand on top, the week's weather left many chunks exposed. The flip-flop and soda bottle speak of local action. But this odd, discolored retail-store shoe hook doesn't.

This one's a first

Here's a wild one. A faded ketchup packet. Unused & unopened, just roughed up; the ketchup is long gone, replaced by wet sand. Surely washed in from the deep, where it had spent ??? months/years.

Would you like fries with that?

And any time dense vinyl scraps like this float in, you know the seas are agitated. Vinyl sinks, so this one spent plenty of time scraping along the seafloor before reaching Bay View.

Seat cover, maybe?

Zone S was odd this time. Usually void of much of Zone N's richness (both natural & manmade), this day it was chock-a-bloc with razor clams, snail shells, slipper shells, and a prominent wrackline. Here's what came out of it:

79 finds:

Building materials: 15 (6 asphalt, 4 roof shingle scraps, 5 brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 15
Fishing misc.: 10 (rope scrap, shotgun shell, 2 claw bands, 5 vinyl trap coatings, rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 1 (gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 4 (Schlitz can top, 2 sea glass, foil)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 20 (balloon w/ long string, 3 caps, 3 package scraps, tape measure case, glasses earpiece, tennis ball, o-ring, 2 scraps >1", 7 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 3 (leather sole fragment, 2 fabric scraps)

Still less than Zone N, but in a season where 20-30 Zone S finds is the norm, finding 79 is worth noting. Also worth noting is one particular piece.

Go for the gusto!

This is the aluminum top to a steel beer can, an old-style pull-tab Schlitz beer can. In fact, some research showed that this style was only used from 1972 to 1975. The Gulf of Maine harbored this little piece of the past for at least 36 years. Until finally releasing it back to the light.

What else awaits in the deep?

Sown. Reaped.

2011-11-08T08:24:00.001-05:00

I woke up this morning to an astounding video posted by my friend Danielle of It Starts With Me on Facebook. This is a canal in the vicinity of Naples, Italy, after recent storms/floods. Take the minute to watch it. And please share.

It's all plastic. Wrap, cartons, jugs, packing, foam, bags.
It's horrifying, but not unexpected. Merely the inevitable result of a plastic, throwaway world. Seriously, how is any other outcome possible? We wonder why plastic is now in all five major oceanic gyres of the world, or why there are no pristine beaches left anywhere on the planet.
Don't be told by the plastic industry that "plastic doesn't litter, people do." Every mudslide, hurricane, tsunami, and other natural disaster in the world proves the bald-faced lie of that statement. Lives & livelihoods wrecked in the moment. Far-flung ecosystems wrecked for decades or centuries afterward.
Change the game.

Collection Report Oct 24, 2011

2011-11-02T11:39:00.001-04:00

Monday, October 24. Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. 1:25PM, a couple hours before low tide. The latest high-tide had been fairly weak, and there was little new wrack/seaweed. An overcast day, 60 degrees and deliciously fall-like.

The cooler days & quieter beach gave me a little time to reflect. On ephemeral rivulets:

A seagull's walk, interrupted

And the wealth of color & texture strewn about:

It's funny what you see, when you just stop & look at a handful of sand and pebbles. (After all, in Maine, that sand may have 600 million years of history behind it.) Even with a weak tide, this was a great day for wash-ins -- slipper shells, blue mussels, tons of crab, a few fish bones. A real treat. Of course, nowadays the modern world always intrudes, though often in colorful ways:

1/1000th of one of the ~1 million lobster
traps on the floor of the Gulf of Maine

Which, I guess, brings me back to the point of a collection report. So, on to it. First, Zone N:

82 finds:

Building materials: 7 (5 asphalt, brick, wood block)
Foam/Styrofoam: 14
Fishing misc.: 7 (3 rope, rope twine, shell wadding, claw band, trap vinyl coating)
Food-related plastics: 1 (plasticized cupcake base?)
Food-related metal/glass: 3 (foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (5 bags/scraps, tube, 2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 36
Paper/wood: 1 (paper scrap)
Misc./unique: 2 (fabric scrap, odd piece of paper with thin wires embedded)

A wide range, but mostly the usual suspects. (Why any of this should be "usual" is another question.) Sad to see so many cigarette butts, but hardly surprised. 5.5 trillion are used in the world each year. If even 90% of those were disposed of properly, that's still about 17,500 tossed on the ground every second. Every second. It's not sustainable, and change is in the air. Where that will leave smokers in the end is, largely, up to smokers to decide.

Over to Zone S:

31 finds:

Building materials: 2 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 6
Fishing misc.: 11 (4 rope, Plante bumper, 3 trap scraps, twine, 2 claw bands)
Food-related plastics: 1 (Gatorade label scrap)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (scraps >1", scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (4 cigs, 1 filter)
Paper/wood: 2 (firecracker sticks)
Misc./unique: 0

Nothing to see here. Except maybe the big black trap corner bumper, nicely stamped with the maker, "PLANTE" on the side. Also, curiously, there are two other words embossed: "CANADA" and "U.S." The "CANADA" had been X'ed out, making this seemingly meant for U.S. traps. Wonder what law/regulation is behind that. Such a regulated industry, yet still leaving such a legacy of debris.

As I was leaving, I noticed this scrawled on a drift-log up in Zone N.

I study the accidental ways we leave pieces of ourselves behind. Here's an intentional one. A hope for a little permanence in an ephemeral world. A reminder that Joyce was here. But a reminder to whom, again? Maybe it doesn't matter. She left, but for a while at least her presence is still at Bay View.

Collection Report Oct 17, 2011

2011-10-28T15:12:00.001-04:00

Monday October 17, 12:15PM, about two hours before high tide. This compressed week -- only 5 days since the last collection -- had started drizzly, and ended windy. In fact, on the 17th it was actually quite gusty, with winds blowing from the west, offshore.

All of which led to a beach so uninteresting that I forgot even to take a picture of it!

I did find some debris, but much of it seems to have been tossed up earlier in the month, maybe buried under sand until the rains & winds revealed it. So, Zone N:

57 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 18
Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope bits, shotgun shell wadding)
Food-related plastics: 4 (food wrapper, 2 straw wrappers, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (2 balloons, marker, marker cap, rubber foot)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 21
Paper/wood: 2 (paper scraps)
Misc./unique: 2 (thread, glass stone)

The big thing(s) of note?

It doesn't really matter where these started. Just where they ended up.

Over to Zone S:

26 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 10
Fishing misc.: 2 (rope twine, vinyl trap scrap)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (bottle scrap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (bits of cord)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Take away the cigarettes and the styrofoam and you've taken away 2/3 of the week's debris. Hopefully the new Bait Tank cigarette butt bin will help with the former. In the few days it had been there, it was already gaining some notice. In fact, there were 3 times as many cigarette butts in the bin as on the parking lot asphalt! Early days and small gains. But real gains.

Collection Report Oct 12, 2011

2011-10-25T17:22:00.000-04:00

The times, they are a-changing.

Bay View, Wednesday October 12, 2011. 12:30PM. A day of clouds & chill gathering after an astounding Indian Summer weekend of 80 degrees and bright sun. The sea this week had been busy, the wrack line pregnant with plastic:

A winter wrack line

Ghost of feasts past

As well as other oddities from the deep!

Ruby wishes I'd brought this home

So what all turned up on the two 250-ft stretches of beach this week? Zone N:

178 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 30
Fishing misc.: 23 (13 clawbands, 6 rope scraps, trap bumper, buoy scrap, trap vinyl coating scrap, reel cap)
Food-related plastics: 6 (3 wrappers, bottlecap ring, 2 chewing gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 5 (2 cans, 1 can scrap, 2 glass shards)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 40 (7 bag scraps, 3 cords/ties, rubber band, chair leg foot, netting, 3 hairclip scraps, bandaid, glove, sticker, toy shovel handle, 10 scraps >1", 10 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 64 (62 filters, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 4 (2 wood firecracker sticks, 2 scraps)
Misc./unique: 5 (sock, fabric, 2 flipflops, battery)

This is a strange mix. The beautiful summer-like weekend no doubt brought the flipflops and beer can. But this:

and this:

look a lot more like winter debris than summer.

Especially when you take into account Zone S:

88 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 11 (inc. large chicken? grocery package chunk)
Fishing misc.: 22 (8 rope, 10 claw bands, shotgun shell, 3 trap vinyl scraps)
Food-related plastics: 10 (2 bottlecaps, bottle, 6 food wrappers, old broken fork)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scraps)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 22 (balloon, Listerine packet, 3 bandaids, 4 strapping, 7 scraps >1", 6 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
Paper/wood: 3 (paper scrap, 2 wood firecracker sticks)
Misc./unique: 6 (4 fabric, tennis ball, candle wax)

For the past several months, Zone S has been averaging only ~1/8 as much debris as Zone N. This week it was up to 1/2. Clearly a bounty from the sea, spread up and down the shoreline. Lots of vinyl and other far-traveled scraps, including this oddity:

"Sealed: Do Not Remove"

I can only wonder what the story is there.

At any rate, a very interesting week. For one thing, lobster trap vinyl coatings were back! These dense bits of plastic coating from rusted lobster traps used to show up all the time. Then, back in May or June, they stopped. For months not one bit of dense vinyl made it to Bay View. Vinyl is much denser than seawater, and sinks to the bottom. (As did the mussel shells, fish bones, etc. that also arrived this week.) So for months it seems that sea-floor currents weren't bringing stuff into Bay View, now suddenly they are again. What will that bode for future weeks? Guess I just have to wait and see.

Shifting Sands

2011-10-17T19:28:00.001-04:00

I know there's been a drop-off here of articles lately. Plenty of collection reports sure, but fewer stories. It's actually been a very busy time. But in case you've missed it on Facebook and/or Twitter, I wanted to take a little time to let you know what I've been up to.

First off, I've been learning some pretty fascinating -- and useful -- science. Did you know that with just water and 4 common household chemicals you can ID the vast majority of any consumer plastics you find? It's all about density. Liquids have different density. Going from least dense to most dense:

Rubbing alcohol (70%)
Castor oil
Water
Glycerin
Corn syrup

Different plastics also have different density -- some like #2, #4, and #5 plastics float in water, others like #1, #3, and #6 sink.

Enter mad scientist

Take that a step further, and you can sort them all out. #2 floats in water but sinks in castor oil. #4 floats in castor oil but sinks in rubbing alcohol (70%). #5, the least dense plastic, floats even in rubbing alcohol. Going the other way, #6 sinks in water but floats in glycerin. #1 sinks in glycerin but floats in corn syrup. And #3 (most vinyls actually) sinks even in corn syrup. It's simple, cheap, and it really works!. This link will tell you more.

Science experiments aside, I've been able to get Flotsam Diaries into the wider world, thanks to two guest-blog posts at the well-regarded "Scientific American" online! The first, on September 5, recapped my Year 1 of collection at Bay View beach here in Saco, Maine. The second, published on October 13, chased a too-perfect statistic often repeated in plastic-pollution circles, following the trail back 27 years into a now-meaningless void. As the recent lawsuit by plastic bag makers against ChicoBag shows, the plastic industry will attack wherever it feels it has a shot. Environmental orgs would do well to fact-check the numbers they use before picking that fight.

Last but not least, there's big news from Bay View beach, Saco, ME. At long last, working with the city council and the head of Saco's Parks and Recreation department, I've gotten a "Bait Tank" cigarette butt bin installed in the beach parking lot!

A beautiful addition

It really is a work of art, right down to the reused surfboard "shark fin" on top. A great way to educate as well as give smokers a resource they've needed. It's early days, but it's already getting used. It was a thrill visiting Bay View yesterday and seeing 3-4 times as many cigarette butts in the bin as on the asphalt!

I'm also working a few more projects that will hopefully start bearing fruit as fall turns to winter. It's a pretty exciting time. A year and a half ago, a trip to the beach woke me up to a real problem in today's world. Since then, I've hoped most of all to learn about it, share what I've learned, and try to make a difference. And that's still the North Star that guides the what, how, & why of it all.

Collection Report Oct 2, 2011

2011-10-16T10:53:00.001-04:00

Early October, and the rain and drear lay thick for several days. During a very lucky ~45-minute break on October 2, I managed to hit the beach long enough to make a fair collection.

The wrack line was back. And with it, the usual suspects. And at least one unusual suspect:

Fading light on 10/1 when my daughter & I discovered

The evening before, my daughter and I wandered the beach as dusk gathered, and found this odd gift from the sea down at the southern end of my "zones." Fortunately it was still there the next morning. A better picture on Oct 2:

Logtek, Inc. is a fishing supply company from Tusket, Nova Scotia, Canada. As the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation explained to me, that doesn't necessarily mean that this floated in from 200 miles away. These crates are in general circulation among fishermen up and down the Gulf, and this one may have fallen off a more nearby dock. Still, it had clearly been bobbing in the sea for a long time.

How many more?

Another good mystery, probably never to be solved. (Though the bin did seem to have remnants of a serial #. Might just be a way to learn more about it sometime.)

The crate may have become flotsam from an unavoidable mishap. But the nine (!) balloons that I found were completely preventable litter. A few were latex (which supposedly disintegrates over time). But many were mylar -- a plastic that persists on & on. My daughter and I went to Saco's harvest festival yesterday. As we watched balloon after balloon escape up into the atmosphere, I wondered how many people actually realize that what goes up eventually comes down.

Anyway, back to 10/2, it's now obvious that scouring of Bay View by Irene is over. Easterly winds have started to bring the ocean's payload back to shore. Crates, balloons, and this double-headed lobster buoy among it:

On to the collection. Zone N:

68 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 10
Fishing misc.: 11 (2 buoys, buoy scrap, buoy rod, 3 claw bands, 2 rope, rope twine, shotgun shell wadding)
Food-related plastics: 12 (2 bottle caps, 2 cups, 2 tops, 6 wrappers)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 22 (4 balloons, 4 latex gloves, pacifier, cord, Hooksett disc, 6 non-food packaging, 2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 12
Paper/wood: 1
Misc./unique: 0

My big question: How is this good advertising?

Number-wise, a small haul. But a dreary week, soaking-wet beach, and a rain-curtailed collection played a part in that. The buoys, balloons, and disc from the NH sewage treatment plant disaster in March prove that the post-Irene lull is over. On to Zone S:

60 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 21
Fishing misc.: 5 (crate from Nova Scotia, 2 buoy scraps, rope twine, claw band)
Food-related plastics: 7 (2 bottles, bottlecap, 2 cups, food wrapper, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 18 (3 bags/scraps, 4 balloons & 1 balloon end, bottlecap, flosser, Hooksett disc, 2 scraps >1", 5 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 9 (8 filters, 1 packaging)
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

An unheard-of thing. Almost the same amount of garbage in Zone S as Zone N. And almost the same kinds of stuff. Which strongly suggests that the week of October 2 was ruled by wave & wind, not the tromping of local feet.

A final thought.

Beer bottlers have succeeded in convincing Eastern Europe to accept plastic beer bottles. It's cheaper for them to produce, and shifts the environmental burden to the unwary consumer. Western Europe and America have resisted. But as this plastic Coors bottle shows, the bottlers aren't going to stop. And are making inroads. The next time you visit a grocery store or drug store, look around at the packaging. Whatever you see that's not yet made of plastic, will be. Marine Debris Conferences aside, plastic pollution is just getting warmed up.

Collection Report Sep 25, 2011

2011-10-09T15:57:00.001-04:00

September 25, 9:15AM, and a beautiful fall morning.

A calm sea and a clean wrack line told the story. No energy, no trash. Sadly, a dead harbor seal pup had washed in. (Apparently that's happening a lot in the Gulf of Maine this fall.) But there was very little else to be seen. Except a beautiful bay under an ever-changing sky.

The light haul from Zone N.

62 finds:

Building materials: 1 (brick chip)
Foam/Styrofoam: 10
Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope pieces, claw band)
Food-related plastics: 6 (bottle cap scrap, 5 food wrappers/scraps)
Food-related metal/glass: 2
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (firework, 1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 35 (34 cigarettes, 1 package scrap)
Paper/wood: 1
Misc./unique: 1 (fabric fill)

The International Coastal Cleanup had its main week from Sep 18-25. More than likely, some local folks hit Bay View as part of it, leading to a surprisingly (shockingly?) litter-free beach. Minus, of course, the ever-present cigarette butts. The story was similar on Zone S.

23 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 13
Fishing misc.: 0
Food-related plastics: 2 (milk bottle cap ring, wrapper scrap)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (3 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
Paper/wood: 2
Misc./unique: 0

I'm glad Ocean Conservancy-sponsored coastal cleanups try to raise awareness. But I wonder if volunteers leave with the wrong impression. It would be easy to think that it takes a beach a whole year to collect debris. It doesn't. Cleanup volunteers should be encouraged to revisit their beach in a month. Or even a few weeks. That might really open eyes. Take this stretch of beaches in the mid-Atlantic, badly fouled just one week after the big cleanup. It hurts to see a beach trashed. It hurts a lot more viscerally to see it when you've just busted your backside to make it better.

Collection Report Sep 18, 2011

2011-10-03T08:59:00.000-04:00

A quick return to Bay View. 10AM. 60 degrees. A partly cloudy, moody, beautiful morning.

The kind of day where leaden skies offset glimmering sand, and you just can't quite tell what the air is doing.

It had only been five days since I'd been here. A couple of those had been cool and drizzly. With gentle tides that left the softest, finest powder behind. Sand dollars peeked out along the low-tide terrace, and there were few people to be seen.

All of which should point to a quiet, clean beach. Which wasn't at all the case. Though at least the litter tried to make itself interesting this week:

How to tell if your beach is in Maine

So, on to it. Zone N:

151 finds:

Building materials: 4 (2 brick bits, asphalt bit, fence slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 20
Fishing misc.: 11 (buoy scrap, 3 rope bits, 6 rope twine, shotgun shell wadding)
Food-related plastics: 6 (cup, bread tag, lid, 3 tear-off tops)
Food-related metal/glass: 7 (can, can scrap, 2 bottlecaps, 3 foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 23 (bag, balloon, 2 condom wrapper scraps, bandaid, 2 firecrackers, rubberband, 2 plugs/grommets, pail handle, 3 scraps >1", 9 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 69 (67 filters, cigar cap, filter tip)
Paper/wood: 10 (7 paper scraps, popsicle stick, 2 firecracker sticks)
Misc./unique: 1 (headband)

A lot! Why? Some was probably lightly buried when I visited on the 13th, and later rains uncovered it. At any rate, the burned bits, styrofoam, and condom wrapper speak more to the 13th than they do to the 18th. Aside from some fishing scraps, the two most likely wash-ins were the faded sand-bucket handle and the balloon.

Those gray plastic fireworks are also strange. Nothing of the sort washed in during 2010. Yet most weeks since late spring 2011 I've seen them. Are they fishing-related somehow? Are they construction -- like blasting caps? Dunno. Would love your thoughts.

At any rate, another week filled mostly with debris of beach people doing beach things. On to Zone S:

22 finds:

Building materials: 1 (tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 10
Fishing misc.: 3 (buoy scrap, rope scrap, shotgun shell wadding)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (bag scrap, pen cap, scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (all filters)
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Zone S continues being comparatively dull & delightful.

Still, the week's big takeaway: A beach that looks clean, probably isn't that clean; a beach that's been picked clean, also probably isn't that clean. All it takes is a late summer shower to remind you. What lies beneath?

Collection Report Sep 13, 2011

2011-10-01T09:56:00.001-04:00

Tuesday, September 13, 7:52 AM. Already a bright, muggy day.

Feeling the glow

Labor Day was well and truly past. The benches, trash cans, lifeguard tower -- stowed away for the year. The sun & sky may not have gotten the message. But the earth had.

Welcome back, mysterious
crawlers of the low-tide line

Autumn's sand trails were back. Sandpipers too, scurrying along the edge of each wave. Along the roads, the leaves of young -- or weak-willed -- maples were already kissed with a hint of red and orange. The earth knows.

Which is why the hot sun and Labor Day remnants strewn across the sand came as a shock. (It was a busy collection, as you'll see.) This twilight time, mid-September, straddles two very different Maines.

Curiously, there was still no wrack-line of Irene debris. The early August wash-in along with Irene's offshore winds really did scour Saco Bay clean. Even so, the ocean still left a couple calling cards:

The NH sewage treatment plant disc
saga continues, and will for years

And another applicator. Sigh.

It's all still out there. It'll make its next appearance when it feels like it. (See Delaware, where heaps of plastic garbage floating in just a week after the big Intl Coastal Cleanup.)

So on to the finds. Zone N first, as always:

177 finds:

Building materials: 3 (1 chunk asphalt, 2 wooden blocks)
Foam/Styrofoam: 28
Fishing misc.: 16 (4 bits rope, 4 claw bands, 6 bits of rope twine, 2 buoy scraps)
Food-related plastics: 6 (bottle, bottlecap, food wrapper, 2 utensils, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 4 (3 cans/scraps, 1 sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 26 (7 bags/scraps, 3 bandaids, 3 toys (tank tread, "hamburger," squishy foot), theme park wristband, 2 bottlecaps, plastic strapping, chair/umbrella plug, expand-foam tube, 1 scrap >1", 6 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 82 (81 filters, 1 wood filter tip)
Paper/wood: 11 (10 paper scraps, 1 wooden stick)
Misc./unique: 1 (fabric scrap)

A little bit of everything, including the partially burned leftovers of at least one massive bonfire (some in this closeup).

Set it, and forget it. BTW, Ruby has a set of plastic food including the same hamburger. Might clean this one up and add it to her collection. Supersize Me.

As always, Zone S had less to offer.

32 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 5
Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope scraps, buoy scrap)
Food-related plastics: 3 (bottle, bottlecap, gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (seaglass, gum wrapper)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (2 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, cord, tennis ball, Hooksett disc, tampon applicator, 2 scraps >1", 2 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 6 (5 filters, 1 rolling paper)
Paper/wood: 2 (paper scrap, wood clothespin)
Misc./unique: 0

Oddly, the most interesting find of the week came from here:

"Game ends 12/31/10"

Old, scuffed, battered... But no signs of sealife on it. So... what's the story? Someone's favorite water bottle, reused for months and then lost? A dog toy? Or ocean-borne? I'd love to know.

Collection Report Sep 3, 2011

2011-09-26T16:19:00.002-04:00

Well, Irene came and went. On Sunday, August 28, cutting more westerly than expected, she hit Saco Bay, Maine with her east flank. 40-50mph winds rocked the coastline all day. But the worst & last of her winds came from W/SW. From inland out to sea. Here's her waning power on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 28:

Scour (Aug. 28, 2011, 6:30PM)

And here's Bay View the next morning, after the midnight high tide had come and gone:

And rinse (Aug. 29, 2011, 8:30AM)

And there you go. Hurricane/TS Irene ruined communities up and down the east coast. But at Bay View, all she left was an utterly clean slate. Not even a dollop of seaweed. All thanks to wind direction (and maybe to the long Saco River jetty a mile down south).

The rest of the week was warm & sunny. The perfect ending to an epic Maine summer. So it's little surprise that when I got back on September 3, there was junk. Though taking away this still-smouldering Bacchanal...

Poor showing

...the haul would have been small. (Note to partiers: Dumping your plastic in an open-air bonfire doesn't make it go away. Pretty much everything you did here reflects badly on you.) As it was, the haul wasn't small. Zone N:

146 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 36
Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, buoy scrap)
Food-related plastics: 22 (4 cups, 5 food wrappers, 4 straw wrappers, 2 cup lids, 3 bottlecaps, 2 bottles, straw, gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 19 (14 cans, Jaegermeister bottle, beer bottle, 2 bottlecaps, foil wrapper)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 19 (5 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, 4 toy scraps, 5 scraps >1", 4 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 35 (34 filters, 1 packaging)
Paper/wood: 10 (9 paper scraps, 1 wood firecracker stick)
Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric pieces, battery)

After all of Irene's fury, Bay View Zone N got maybe 2-3 pieces of ocean-borne debris. A bit of rope, a buoy scrap, and maybe this stained, abraded bottle cap:

The stories you could tell...

On the other hand, Irene probably blew away 40-50 cigarette butts (edit: 40-50 from Zone N; probably hundreds from the rest of Bay View), and who knows what else?

Zone S, always low on litter this year, offers little more enlightenment:

28 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 19 (!)
Fishing misc.: 1 (rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 2 (scrap of spoon/fork, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

The only thing of note: the spike in styrofoam over the usual Zone S finds.

A day after the storm, I watched a video of a 140-year-old covered bridge in Vermont washing away into splinters from the raging torrents. That was Irene's reality for so many of my fellow Northeasterners. At Bay View beach, ~20 pieces of styrofoam may well be the best -- the only -- evidence for Irene. With that, and the removal of one wonky tree along the 3-mile route between my condo and the beach, she was well and truly gone from Saco, Maine. We got lucky. My heart goes out to those who didn't.

The Waning Days of Summer

2011-09-24T08:35:00.000-04:00

A Maine summer passes so quickly. Below is a little snapshot of mornings on Bay View beach from the past few weeks. If "The Flotsam Diaries" tends to focus on the ugly, it's with the hope of recognizing & preserving the beauty.

Before the crowds - August 19, 7:00AM

Pipers' return - August 27

A memory - August 27

Irene's last gasp - August 28

Of ripples and rivulets - September 3

Worlds collide - September 13

Tiger maple - September 13

Backlight - September 18

Bonfire's end - September 18

It's a good place, and it was a good summer.

Collection Report Aug 27, 2011

2011-09-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, August 27 the first tendrils of Hurricane Irene were lashing North Carolina's Outer Banks. The storm would later barrel up the eastern seaboard, destroying more by water than by wind. Communities from Virginia to Vermont will be recovering from her for years.

Coastal Maine was to be spared, blessedly, when the storm rolled through Sunday evening. But at 6:45 Saturday morning, with heavy fog and heavier air, I couldn't know that. I went out to scour the beach, before Irene did it for me.

Something wicked this way comes

For all the storm-of-a-lifetime expectancy, this collection was a typical summer haul. The usual trappings of beachgoer fun (plus the unpleasant remnants of a late-night liaison). And, of course, one of these thrown in:

Every week, a distant world peeks in

In the interest of brevity & actually getting this collection report posted, on to the finds. Zone N:

208 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 9
Fishing misc.: 10 (2 rope, 3 claw bands, trap tag, tiny buoy scrap, 3 rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 30 (bottle, 8 bottlecaps, 5 food wrappers, 7 straw wrappers, 2 forks, silverware scrap, 2 straws, 3 gum, bread tag)
Food-related metal/glass: 13 (glass bottle, 2 bottlecaps, 7 foil wrappers, pull tab, 2 sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 29 (5 plastic bags, firecracker, 2 pieces tape, rubberband, hairclip, 3 toys, 2 bandaids, condom & wrapper, tampon, 4 scraps >1", 7 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 85 (84 filters, 1 cigar wrapper)
Wood/paper: 22 (18 paper scraps, 4 wood firecracker sticks)
Misc./unique: 10 (4 flipflops, 1 sock, 3 scraps fabric, saw blade, rusted scrap)

A thoroughly summer beach collection, with a couple hints of lobstering thrown into the mix. Still, as always a pretty fascinating slice of life. The 29 objects below tell an awful lot about a summer day (and night) on a Maine beach.

Summer in Maine

What stories does your shore tell?

Sadly, I either misplaced or erased the picture of lightly-traveled Zone S.

* thoroughly unimpressive *

* picture missing here *

21 finds:
Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 3
Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope, 1 rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 3 (2 bottlecaps, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (bottlecap)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (bag scrap, 2 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 6 (filters)
Wood/paper: 2 (paper scrap, wood firecracker stick)
Misc./unique: 0

Fortunately, there really was nothing to see. Again, an almost pristine swath just a short stroll down from a well-polluted one.

So ended my day. The rest of the weekend was spent inside, watching news reports, or watching the trees blow & bend sideways. What did Irene leave in its wake? That'll have to wait til the next collection report.

The Long View

2011-09-19T11:38:00.000-04:00

We think of the passage of time in a very, well, human way. (How could we not?) A day ago-- pretty recent. A year ago-- less so. A hundred years-- a dim echo of grainy filmclips and sepia portraits. A millennium? Ancient history.

It's little surprise if we bring this same view to the beach. Our grasp on time is framed by the Victorian house overlooking the dunes, the rotted pilings from some forgotten pier.

Yet, in reality, we're standing on one page of a story that stretches back, and back, and back to the uttermost past. Literally. The sand that makes up Bay View beach, Saco, Maine began life about 600 million years ago. This is a brief story of one grain of that sand.

600 million years ago, North America was a different place, a young continent named Laurentia (or the non-poetic "North American Craton").

I bet coastal Kentucky was lovely

Where's Maine? It didn't exist yet! Since the world was young, land masses have been born, eroded away, crashed together, rifted apart. Many times. The sturdy roots of North America have been here for a billion years or more. But Maine is a relative late-comer.

600 million years ago, a grain of quartz eroded out of the exposed face of a vanished granite hillside, and was washed downward by a vanished river. When it finally reached the Iapetus Ocean (the precursor to our modern Atlantic), it settled down to the sea-floor and was buried by other sediment. There it lay for millions of years, buried & compacted, becoming chemically attached to other grains around it, forming a sandstone.

By 500 million years ago other lands were converging on Laurentia. The Iapetus Ocean was shrinking & dying, succumbing to plate tectonics forcing continents together. 450 million years ago, volcanic islands off Laurentia's east coast were squeezed back onto the coast, an event called the Taconic orogeny. Our little grain of sand was swept up in the fury, as the stone it lay in bent, buckled, and shot upward out from under the disappearing sea. Over the next 200 million years, more and more islands, mini-continents, and even supercontinents crashed into Laurentia, crushing the old offshore sandstones & mudstones together. This was the birth of the Appalachian Mountains, and the birth of Maine as an above-ground landmass.

By 250 million years ago, all the continents of the world were welded together into one land, Pangea.

Know how Africa & S. America look like
jigsaw puzzle pieces? There's a reason!

The young Appalachian mountain range probably towered 5 miles into the sky, as high as the modern Himalayas! Maine was a land-locked metamorphic mass-- the farthest thing from coastal. Our grain of sand now lay in a metamorphosed stone known as quartzite. Though it was now a mile up, it was still buried by layers of hardened lava from volcanic eruptions.

Slowly, over millions of years this overburden eroded away, running down other vanished rivers. Where did all that sediment go? Into the newly born Atlantic Ocean! ~200 million years ago, the forces that pulled the continents together now ripped them apart. North America broke free from Europe & Africa, and the Atlantic was born. Our tiny grain of sand now lay 150 miles away from Maine's brand-new coastline, still trapped high up in the towering Appalachians.

(The Atlantic Ocean is still widening today. Every year Maine gets about an inch further from Europe, thanks to the action of the mid-Atlantic Ridge.)

The Atlantic Ocean - work in progress

~50 million years ago, erosion finally exposed the quartzite rock holding our grain of sand. But quartzite is tough. It erodes, but only slowly. Our sand grain held out in its cozy home, as the weaker stone around it eroded away. Eventually it lay within a tall, weathered quartzite lump -- a last reminder of the majesty of the early Appalachians. But Mother Nature had another trick. 1.8 million years ago, the earth began entering a series of glaciations (misleadingly called "ice ages"). 20,000 years ago, glaciers reached their greatest extent, covering all of Maine in a wall of ice a mile high!

Glaciers aren't static, silent blocks of ice. With their terrible weight, they move, grind, torture, and pulverize the rocks beneath them. This last glacier rode up and over the denuded mountain holding our sand grain. And it ground it down. As it ate its way across the surface, it finally freed our grain of sand. It then moved the sand down and down, south & east. When the glacier finally receded 10,000 years ago, it left the sand grain on lowlands 50 miles west of the coast in a mass of clay, boulders, and debris a tenth of a mile deep.

Since then, the Saco River has been slowly eroding away the banks of all this debris, washing it down to the Gulf of Maine. Eventually -- maybe 5000 years ago, maybe last year -- the grain of sand fell out of the eroded rubble bank, plunged into the Saco River, and rolled & bounced its way the last 50 miles to the ocean. The ocean then churned & tossed it up onto Bay View beach. Where I scooped it up in my hand last week. Along with 10,000 other grains that all have their own tale to tell.

The world is an incredible, beautiful, and wondrous place. It would be nice if we kept it that way.

Distant Early Warning

2011-09-14T21:23:00.000-04:00

One of the joys of picking up junk at the beach every week is stumbling on a good mystery. This summer, an intriguing one has been unfolding, week after week.

For months -- late winter and most of spring -- any lobster claw bands that trickled in looked like this:

From March 31. Blech.

Grotty, torn, a mess. Then, suddenly, June 2 rolls around. And so do these:

Fresh & springy

Except for the one in the back right, all brand new. Beautiful. And from Canada. The next week, June 7, another one:

Another Canadian band

I took the next week off, but on June 20 I found a big handful, the green & yellows almost certainly (two really certainly) Canadian:

Sensing a pattern...

And more have kept coming in.
June 23: 3 more, 2 Canadian/probably Canadian.
July 1: 4 more, 3 Canadian/probably.

July 7-9: 7 more, 6 Canadian/probably.
July 15, 5 more, all Canadian/probably:

July 15: Hello, my pretties

On and on, even now into September. In fact, since June 2, nearly every week has brought fresh, new, beige or green claw bands that are either stamped "Wild Canada" or are clearly the same make and likely Canadian.

Last year, from the first day of summer to the 1st week in September I found 17 claw bands. Maybe three were Canadian. This year during the same time I found 49. 42 to 44 of them are new, fresh, pristine, beige/green, and Canadian!

Some time in May, in the northern Gulf of Maine / Bay of Fundy, as lobstering in Canadian Zones 33-38 was winding down, an accident happened on a Canadian lobster boat. I don't know if it was a catastrophic accident, or just a box of claw bands getting knocked overboard. But what I'm finding here in Saco Bay is directly related to an event that happened 150-200 miles away. Its effects have rippled down the coast of Maine (and no doubt further south) ever since. Curious how much longer I'll be finding these.

We're all connected. For proof, just stroll the beach.

Collection Report Aug 19, 2011

2011-09-08T21:40:00.001-04:00

Gotten behind on these again! Then again, if I'm being honest, I find summer collection reports, well, dull. Sure, there's a little that washes in. But there's so much local beachgoer garbage. Such a stark reminder of why it's such an uphill climb trying to restore & reclaim the pristine beauty of wild places.

Still, 7:15AM on Friday, August 19 was gorgeous, no two ways about it.

Rise and shine

And nothing was going to spoil the enjoyment of a nice walk in the early day. Not this:

Cheers!

Or this:

Art!

Instead, I took a little time to study the beauty, like the dune grass that is quickly reclaiming several feet of foreshore.

This was beach in 2010

Funny. Dune grass, like a piece of flotsam, has a story to tell. When it's been windy, the blades bend & drag through the sand, leaving concentric rings (like these from back in Oct 2010). When it's been calm, no rings. Even without Weather Underground, it doesn't take long to see that there's no sign of strong winds at the beach this week. (Remember, this is pre-Irene.)

So, not surprisingly, a busy, summery collection. Zone N:

198 finds:

Building materials: 3 (2 wood, 1 tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 11
Fishing misc.: 13 (5 rope, 4 claw bands, 3 rope twine, shotgun shell wadding)
Food-related plastics: 31 (12 food wrappers, 7 straw wrappers, 4 bottle caps, bottle, straw, fork scrap, bread tag, gum, milk cap ring, cap seal, fruit label)
Food-related metal/glass: 11 (3 cans, glass bottle, 6 caps, foil food wrapper)
Nonfood/unknowng plastics: 36 (11 bags/scraps, 4 toys/scraps, 2 non-food caps, 2 strappings, 2 ribbon, footing, bandaid, 3 scraps >1", 10 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 71 (69 cigarettes, filter tip, Kodiak pack)
Paper/wood: 18 (12 paper scraps, chip, popsicle stick, firework, 3 firework sticks)
Misc./unique: 4 (2 string bits, 2 metal barrettes)

Except for a few left-behinds from the Sep '10 seaweed wash-in, this is a summer signature. Picked up another intact shovel for the collection, and a nice French-made barrette with turquoise stones. And this -very- salt-scarred steel bottlecap.

Help me!

On to Zone S:

22 finds:

Building materials: 1 (brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 5
Fishing misc.: 2
Food-related plastics: 6 (2 bottle caps, 3 food wrappers, gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknowng plastics: 3 (firecracker, 2 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (3 filters, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Yawn. A 20-second walk from Zone N to Zone S. A completely different world.

Good Reads

2011-09-03T16:07:00.001-04:00

I picked up my first bag of trash off the beach in March 2010. I wrote my first blog post in May 2010. It seems like a lifetime ago. I guess in some ways it is.

One thing that's kept the fire burning has been discovering other amazing people also fighting to change their world. Nonprofits and organizations, sure. But most heartening has been regular folks, bloggers, other people with their own lives to balance, who nevertheless take their time to do something that reaches beyond them.

It's impossible, in one post, to note all the people whose writings have touched me and kept me going. But I feel it's high time to try, at least a little bit. So, here goes:

The first person I "met" was Sara Bayles. She writes The Daily Ocean. What started as finding -- and hating -- trash on her Santa Monica beach recently became an epic South Pacific voyage studying plastic pollution up close. She's now back home, and her serialized travelogue -- as well as the ongoing saga of hundreds of lbs. of beach debris -- is a must-read.

Through Sara I discovered Danielle Richardet of It Starts with Me. She and her family pick trash -- and cigarette butts -- off Wrightsville Beach, NC. To date, she ~~is nearing~~has reached 30,000 cigarette butts. 30,000 pulled off one beach, by one family! A true inspiration, and always a great read.

Closer to my part of the world, I follow the lazy (and not so lazy) courses of countless rivers & streams in central and eastern Massachusetts with Suasco Al, The Trash Paddler. Every trip, Al carts off dozens of cups, bottles, wrappers, etc. that others have left behind in pristine wilderness. Tens of thousands of pieces over 4 years now. Read it for the trash, read it for the beautiful scenery & descriptions, just read it!

I recently discovered Ellen of The House Behind the Other Houses. Hailing from eastern Massachusetts, Ellen is constantly cleaning up "The Ugly Strip" in her neighborhood. But she does much more. She posts plastic-bag walls of shame; gardens & cooks some mouth-watering looking yummies; and brings life back to her asphalt jungle one small garden plot at a time. It's good stuff, and makes me smile to read it.

My world is the coast, and yet until too recently I never really stopped to look at it. Or to understand it. But I've learned to appreciate the way that wind, wave, and dune live and breathe. And I've been grateful for things Somerset Coast, across the "Pond," has been able to teach and show me. A wonderful blog for anybody interested in how coastlines form, change, erode, adapt. How they live.

Earth Korps is another new find for me. Their goal is "simple": to save & heal the 300-mile, polluted Shenandoah River that runs through Virginia and West Virginia. These folks will pull over half a ton of debris out of the river in one cleanup day! They don't mind getting dirty, they bust their backsides to make a difference, and their story deserves to be told & spread.

In the same vein is Chad Pregracke's Living Lands and Waters project. Less a blog than a way of life, Pregracke runs barges up and down the Mississippi River and major tributaries, pulling out countless tons of debris, which is floated on barges to salvage shops and dumps. It started as just one guy, hoping to make a difference. As just one example of the difference he's made, to date he and his crews have pulled over 55,000 tires from the waters.

A delightful and enigmatic blog, Catch What a Whale Shouldn't Have to Eat is updated almost daily by an anonymous blogger living somewhere in coastal North Shore Massachusetts. The breadth of what they find, the artistry in the images, and the desire to know more about this person and their work will keep you coming back.

Massachusetts has the Trash Paddler, Washington state has Garbage Scows. Another explorer committed to "taking only trash, leaving only swirls." And from the looks of it, they've got their job cut out for them.

I can't finish without a nod of appreciation to the Two Hands Project. Australia-based, but touching the world, the concept is simple: return the idea of global coastal cleanups to the awesome power of one person and their own two hands. They're most active on their FaceBook page. Check it out, thumb through the photos & the stories, and get inspired to do big things, two hands and a few minutes at a time.

There are more, many more that I read gladly. But these sites above are the ones that I go back to over & over because they inspire me. They make me want to pick up my trash bag and camera and do what I can. They remind me of the key truth: If there's something you love, if there's something you care about, you're not alone.

Collection Report Aug 10-12, 2011

2011-08-31T20:22:00.001-04:00

(It's already strange looking back to the pre-Irene world. We in Saco, Maine were spared the worst. My heart breaks for VT, upstate NY, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Yet, as I've fallen behind again in collection reports, I must revisit the lazy and carefree days of mid-August. They were interesting.)

I went to beach Wed afternoon, Aug 10 just to log some old debris in the "Debris Tracker" iPhone app (a must-have for all flotsamologists). But when I got there, this is what I saw:

What the hey?

Southern Maine, had gotten a little drizzle, a little gloom the previous week. But no storm or wind. So what on earth happened here?

Turns out, Downeast Maine got hammered by a major hailstorm (YouTube clip here) the week before, on August 2. Millions of chunks of ice pummeled coastal towns, as well as seaweed & kelp exposed at low tide. Normal currents then swirled the broken mass southward over the next week, until arriving in Saco Bay on Aug. 10.

And of course, an army of seaweed collects the ocean's tag-alongs before reaching shore again. A few examples:

Fishing rope on its way in

Lobster trap tag

Antifreeze bottle, repurposed

Another sewage treatment plant disc
from the March Hooksett, NH release!

Sadly, I didn't arrive with either the time or the bags to do a full cleanup. So I grabbed what I could, and made plans for a return. Which didn't happen until two days later, Friday, Aug. 12. By which time the scene had changed:

So much gone already

More than half the seaweed -- and its plastics -- had been dragged back out into the Bay, and then the wider Gulf of Maine. Maybe to beach again near, maybe far. Who knows?

Still, I did what I could, and collected what I could. And made a strinking haul. Here's Zone N:

249 finds:

Building materials: 1
Foam/Styrofoam: 29
Fishing misc.: 43 (20 rope bits, 7 claw bands, 4 trap tags, 7 rope twine, trap hinge, bait plastic baggie, shotgun shell, bait bag, makeshift buoy #9739)
Food-related plastics: 36 (bottle, 10 bottle caps, 14 food wrappers, 4 straw wrappers, 2 straws, 4 bits old cup lid, gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 15 (2 cans, 2 bottles, 5 bottle caps, metal fork, 5 foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 52 (15 bags/scraps, 3 balloons, jug cap, 3 bandaids, 2 strappings, plug cover, Hooksett disc, 2 bits tape, plastic clamp, fitting, 10 scraps >1", 12 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 56 (53 filters, 3 cigar tips)
Paper/wood: 12 (9 paper scraps, 3 wood firecracker sticks)
Misc./unique: 5 (tar/rubber chunk, cord, 2 flipflops, piece of fabric)

Much more of a winter "signature" on this debris. Just look at all the fishing debris! But an interesting mix. Because clearly there was plenty of local stuff:

Summer sunbather debris

As well as ocean-borne goods, like this makeshift fisherman's float.

#9739, I've got your antifreeze jug!

And then this:

Not local, not recent

That discolored and extra-brittle cup lid has a story to tell. Wonder where it started its journey. And when.

With that, on to Zone S:

53 finds:

Building materials: 1 (tile)
Foam/Styrofoam: 12
Fishing misc.: 11 (3 rope, trap part, 3 claw bands, 3 shell waddings, 1 urchin tag)
Food-related plastics: 5 (wrapper, 4 bottle caps)
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (foil wrapper)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 20 (2 bags/scraps, caulk nozzle, yellow plastic lumber chunk, Liposan tube scrap, rubber sleeve, 2 wet-wipes jug lid bits, 2 firecrackers, 1 scrap >1", 9 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 3
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

Must have been a big event to raise Zone S's finds above 50 for a week! And as proof of some long distance travel, a couple fascinating finds:

Faint "Oct 24" written in. What year?

Still want to find out how long
it takes barnacles to form on plastic

So, a very "wintery" collection on a very summery week. And yet more proof of three things: (1) What happens 150 miles away doesn't stay 150 miles away; (2) The Gulf of Maine is a plastic wasteland, 365 days a year; (3) The ocean is trying hard to rid itself of our debris. It will get clean again, if we stop force-feeding it.

Can we do that?

Collection Report Aug 4, 2011

2011-08-19T13:43:00.001-04:00

Thursday, August 4, 7:22 AM. Seagulls crying in the distance. Flipflops left by the lifeguard tower, a ratty beach chair folded up & stowed away. (Forgotten?) Fog slowly burning off. Welcome to Bay View, Saco, Maine:

Still love seeing a beach like this

The week brought a little more energy to Bay View. Recent tides had crept higher up the shore, a few bits tumbled in from the deep ocean. But in general, the word of this day was still "dull." In fact, the above is the only picture I took while out and about. This had basically been another busy beach week, with busy-beach trash. Here's Zone N:

229 finds:

Building materials: 4 (asphalt chunks)
Foam/Styrofoam: 15
Fishing misc.: 17 (4 rope, 8 pieces of rope twine unfurled from impromptu "art" on shore, 4 claw bands, 1 trap tag)
Food-related plastics: 32 (15 food wrappers, 3 fresh fruit stickers, 7 straw wrappers, 4 bottle caps, straw, chewing gum, spoon scrap)
Food-related metal/glass: 10 (burned tin can, 4 bottle caps, 2 foil wrappers, 2 sea glass, pull tab)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 32 (9 bags/scraps, balloon, 2 bandaids, flosser, watergun stopper, sunglasses, rubberband, tie strap, pen cap, twist-tie, 5 ribbon bits, dessicant, 7 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 93 (89 cigarettes, 4 plastics)
Paper/wood: 21 (13 paper scraps, 7 firecracker sticks, popsicle stick)
Misc./unique: 5 fabric scraps

Going on the record here, I hate these things:

Fresh fruit, now with more plastic!

I know, of all the things to hate. But it's so unnecessary. Even a person trying to be healthy, eating an unpackaged piece of fresh fruit -- instead of corn syrup, salt, and modified food starch -- ends up with plastic at the end of their snack. Why, and how, did we do this in just a couple generations?

The other thing I hate:

I have 2100 more at home

The cigarette numbers have been lower on the beach than last year. I hate that I'm kind of happy to "only" find 89 of these in a week. And the parking lot that I scoured in June is utterly trashed with them again. (But I have exciting news on that front, which I'll only tease with here. Maybe somebody will take the Bait?)

Anyway, food packs, cigarettes, And a quick view of Zone S:

31 finds:

Building materials: 1 (fence slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 4
Fishing misc.: 5 (fishing rope twine, from another decayed bit of art)
Food-related plastics: 3 (food wrapper scrap, straw wrapper, gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scrap, sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 7 (firecracker, tape, 1 scrap >1", 4 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 6
Paper/wood: 2 (popsicle stick, firework stick)
Misc./unique: 1 (tiny scrap of fabric)

Wow. There is just nothing to say about this. Wouldn't it be nice to think that a long stretch of Saco Bay really stayed this relatively clean week after week?

Down the Drain

2011-08-13T20:11:00.002-04:00

Ever see this?

This one is in Minnesota, http://www.watersheddistrict.org

Many of us have seen stencils like this on our local storm drains. But what exactly does it mean?

Exactly what it says. Gutters and storm drains are simple, basic, ancient technology. A hole in the road, a pipe buried in the ground, an outlet at the nearest water body. With very few exceptions, stormwater systems don't run stormwater through any kind of filter or purifier. It's a straight shot: road --> gutter --> catch basin --> underground pipe --> river/bay/harbor.

Which is why scenes like this...

from http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org

...lead to scenes like this, in Baltimore Harbor:

Story at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/
green/2010/03/talking_trash_in_bmore.html

...and ultimately contribute to scenes like this, at Kamilo Beach, Hawaii:

Surf's up

Thinking globally & acting locally, how do storm drains work in my part of the world, Saco, Maine? It so happens, Saco has some amazing resources available. One of these is a public Global Information System that plots out all roads, sidewalks, traffic lights, streams, wooded areas, elevations, sewers, and, yes, storm drains! Here is the route from the stream at the edge of our condo, through storm drains passing under houses, then straight down Spring Street to its end in the Saco River.

Does your city/town make this available too?
More and more do all the time.

So this:

Culvert collecting water from bamboo-hidden stream

...wends its way 8 or 9 blocks until it outflows here:

At the foot of a parking lot behind a
nondescript workshop/office

The grates on that stream culvert are large enough to let a beer can or quart-sized plastic jug in. And once they're in, nothing can or will stop them from reaching the river. Even the smaller catch basins still let them in. Bottles, candy wrappers, plastic bags, tennis balls, tiddly-winks, chew toys, pacifiers, plastic flowers -- whatever you can picture accidentally (or not) ending up in a gutter -- will reach the river. From there, they will reach the ocean. That's how it works. In Saco, and in most other cities & towns all across the world. That's how this washes up on my beach:

Antifreeze jug, lost into a culvert in mid-Coast
or Downeast Maine, finally reaches Saco Bay

The day I visited my local drain outflow, August 3, was warm, sunny, quiet. The water trickled out lazily. I stood and watched for just a minute. And even then, the predictable sights started plopping out, one at a time.

The usual suspects

This in 1 minute, from a stream/drain system that runs through residential neighborhoods with low foot traffic. I'm going to go back during the next rainstorm, to see what comes out then. Do I really want to know?

New plastic is being added to the Saco River, and Saco Bay, every minute. The same is true the world over. Does the phrase "thrown away" have any meaning when there is no "away"?

Collection Report July 31, 2011

2011-08-08T14:10:00.001-04:00

Still playing catchup with the backlogged cleanups. So today, welcome back to Bay View, July 31 edition!

6:50 AM on a Sunday, and already hopping

Lots of dawn-peepers & dogwalkers enjoying the early morning quiet. More bright, beautiful sun promising another amazing -- and crowded -- beach day.

The headline for this week's finds would read: "Man Visits Busy Beach, Finds Trash." The summer tides are weak. Little seaweed is washing in, or shells, or other flotsam. So what ends up in my trash bag is just a cross-section of Maine beach life. Maybe interesting enough for that reason alone. But by now, very predictable. Such as:

Every week

So this will be a pretty quick report, without the ooh's and ahh's of long-distance journeys. First, as always, Zone N:

236 finds:

Building materials: 2 (asphalt, fence slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 16
Fishing misc.: 3 (bits of fishing rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 41 (27 food wrappers!, 7 bottlecaps, bottle, 2 straws, 2 gum, 2 cup lids)
Food-related metal/glass: 21 (5 cans, 6 caps, 8 wrappers, 2 glass scraps)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 29 (9 bags/scraps, cap, 3 toys/scraps, 2 ribbon/tape, 2 beach furniture, 11 scraps >1", 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 81 (79 filters, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 41 (8 firework sticks, 5 firework casings, 28 scraps)
Misc./unique: 5 (sock, 4 fabric pieces)

See? Beachgoers. End of story. But 27 food wrappers... Wow? Or the inevitable result of a culture of single-serve snacks packed in plastic tubs, wrapped in plastic film, handed to us in a plastic bag?

Quickly over to Zone S:

37 finds:

Building materials: 1 (wood block)
Foam/Styrofoam: 11
Fishing misc.: 6 (2 rope bits, 4 twine)
Food-related plastics: 5 (bottle, 3 straw wrappers, straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (2 bag scraps, toy scrap, firecracker)
Cigarette filters/plastics: 8 (7 filters, 1 packaging)
Paper/wood: 2 (popsicle stick, paper scrap)
Misc./unique: 0

Still too little here to feel "natural"; I suspect a weekly local cleanup effort. Which, if true, kind of kills the value of Zone S. Still, until I know for sure, I'll keep at it. If there's anything here worth a glance, it's the batch of blue Nerf-like foam, some of which also ended up (started up?) in Zone N. Also, the fishing rope comes from this totem pole from the prior week. Cute when it was made. Now? Just more litter.

Anyway, that's July for the record books. Summertime, and the picking is easy. On to August!

Collection Report July 24, 2011

2011-08-07T11:12:00.001-04:00

Sunday, July 24, 7:15AM, the tail end of a sweltering week. And even now the parking lot was already full. Sunday mornings seem to bring lots of dawn-watchers and dog-walkers. And who could blame them?

There's nothing like the beach under a swift sunrise

It was a busy, messy week. And the evidence lay all around. Another day, another firecracker...

There's nowhere to hide

And maybe another Flotsam Diaries mascot?

Anyone know what this little
magnetized pivot-head guy is?

Here's what the day brought. Zone N:

228 finds:

Building materials: 3 (asphalt, brick, slat)
Foam/Styrofoam: 13
Fishing misc.: 6 (5 rope twine, claw band)
Food-related plastics: 31 (2 bottles, 5 caps, 3 lids, 3 chewing gum, 12 food/straw wrappers, knife, 5 straws)
Food-related metal/glass: 19 (2 cans, 4 bottles, 4 caps, 8 foil wrappers, sea glass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 42 (10 bags/scraps, 2 balloons, bandaid, 7 toys/scraps, 5 firecrackers, 2 twist-ties, 4 nylon ribbon/cord, 3 scraps >1", 8 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 72 (70 cigarettes, 2 packaging)
Paper/wood: 34 (12 firecracker sticks, 3 popsicle sticks, 19 paper frags)
Misc./unique: 8 (2 flipflops, 2 scraps fabric, battery, dessicant, zipper, cord)

What happens at the end of a day to could compel anyone to walk off and forget a 3-foot-long inflatable happy-face float??

I'm glad they did. It wsa the highlight in a dull day. Summer collections are, in general, dull. Beachgoer stuff left behind by beachgoers. It's the storms of winter that really show just what's out there in the ocean -- that tell of long travels, huge swells, crashing waves. On the other hand, summer beach "stuff" becomes the faded, brittle, bryozoan-encrusted flotsam of winter. So getting 228 pieces of it off the beach this day still feels good.

Now, on to the conundrum that is Zone S:

23 finds:

Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
Foam/Styrofoam: 2
Fishing misc.: 5 (rope pieces)
Food-related plastics: 4 (3 wrappers, 1 straw)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (tampon-unused, glowstick, twist tie, 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 6
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 1 (thread of fabric)

If I was suspicious before, I'm now all but certain that this isn't a natural spread. 10 times the amount of trash from Zone N to Zone S? Unheard-of last summer. But without any evidence of what's happening yet, all I can do is keep walking week after week and record it. I do think I've had about enough feminine hygiene products for now, though, thanks.

This week the finds may have been dull. But still, the day wasn't. It started with that gorgeous low sun bursting through the clouds. And it ended with some neat sights down at Zone S. I've talked about the dunes reclaiming the beach there. Here finally is a picture. (Solid yellow line shows last year's fence/dune line; the arrows show all the new growth.)

A dozen+ feet of new dune. Cool.

The trend the world over is dunes receding, eroding, dying. Not here at Bay View. Here they're muscling their way back toward the foreshore. I wonder why?

And to end the week, an impromptu art installation/totem pole. I don't know what it means...

Don't see this every day

...But I like it. You just never know what the next week will bring.

Bagging the Rhetoric

2011-08-04T21:28:00.001-04:00

On July 31, Lisa Kaas Boyle, co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, wrote a fact-based article for The Huffington Post on the myths of plastic recycling. Today, Mark Daniels, VP of Marketing and Environmental Affairs for Hilex Poly (a major plastic bag maker/recycler), retorted with a less-fact-based article. His industry spin compelled me to reply, both in the article, and here.

1. "We believe in educating the public about... potential dangers of reusable bags."
Suggesting that most reusable bags contain lead & other heavy metals, or contain bacteria that are a dire danger is a cheap scare tactic. If you have independent, peer-reviewed data supporting this, show it. Otherwise, it's hot air.

2. "At the crux of this plastic bag debate is the principle of consumer freedom."
If so, then surely the industry would support a small fee on plastic bags to cover the cost of cleanup for the inevitable pollution. Such a fee would help maintain clean communities and retain consumer choice. But the industry aggressively fights even a 5-cent tax whose proceeds were targeted for river cleanup.

3. "Recycling plastic reduces the use of virgin plastic."
No. You can't economically make a recycled bag from already-reheated & reformed material, it's too weak and degraded. So even if your bags were made of 100% recycled plastic, the only way to get that plastic is to pump in a steady supply of virgin film, which has to get recycled before it can be turned into a recycled bag. It's a never-ending spiral of virgin plastic.

4. "More than 800 million lbs of plastic bags and film are recycled every year."
The U.S. produces 36.6 billion lbs of #2 & #4 resin a year. 800 million lbs is 2.2% of that. Moreover, 57% of that 800 million lbs of recycled film is just exported to developing nations like China (p. 3 of the report). This percentage is climbing every year.

This deserves re-emphasis: Already, more than half of the film that we recycle has no market in the U.S. It gets dumped extremely cheaply on countries without any safety infrastructure in place. How can the argument be "recycle more" when we can't deal with what we already recycle?

5. "Sales of other, heavier gauge plastic bags soared by 400 percent in Ireland after they implemented a ban on plastic bags."
It was a tax, not a ban. And what was the original number of heavy bags used; what's the new number? Ireland cut grocery bag use by ~1 billion a year. Are you suggesting that the Irish now use 1 billion heavy-gauge bags in their place? Overall, how many tons of #2 and #4 resin are staying out of the environment because of the tax? How many individual bags? Please tell us the numbers. Saying "400% increase" by itself is useless. Apples to oranges.

6. "Plastic pollution can be cleaned out of the environment."
Egregiously false. Plastic cannot be effectively and efficiently cleaned out of the environment. The microplastics swirling in the ocean cannot be removed without removing plankton too -- the very base of the entire food web. As for what's killing marine life, was this turtle a one-off? Or these bags, pulled from a dead whale?

7. "The easier it is for consumers to recycle plastic bags, the less likely it is for them to be disposed of improperly."
Plastic can just as easily blow out of a recycling bin as a trash bin. Or a recycling truck as easily as a trash truck. Or a recycling center as easily as a landfill. Or a person's hand in a gust of wind no matter what their best-laid plans were. And even if a bag successfully runs the long gauntlet and is made into another bag, it then has to run the gauntlet all over again. The concept that a plastic bag only enters the environment if the original owner didn't mean to recycle it is ludicrous.

8. "Time for common sense legislation."
Absolutely agreed. Common sense says that small fees on a bag do wonders for the environment. It also says that if you put a tiny fee on a bag and people immediately stop using the bag, they never really loved the bag. They just used it because it was there. You talk about choice? The tiniest of taxes in Washington, DC suddenly make people realize they have a choice.

With the experience, talent, and firepower behind you, you at Hilex Poly and the American Chemistry Council could be truly part of the solution. Instead, you grasp onto an old, failed system while the world moves beyond it. The biggest of missed opportunities.

Collection Report July 15, 2011

2011-08-04T11:55:00.000-04:00

Another perfect morning, and a message from the dawn...

No, you're not wigging out, it's upside-down

If you want to be first to the beach in Maine in July, you've got to get there before 7:30AM.

This was going to be an interesting pickup. For one thing, energy in the waves had brought in various sea-going bits and bobs. From organics all alone...

"Mush" bits pock-marking outflow

...to organics tagging along on plastics:

Tagging along on a piece of plastic

Algae/bryozoa on this plastic sleeve

And then, to top of the day, another one of these.

Awesome. Another one.

Again? Really? Anyway, the totals. Zone N:

323 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 35
Fishing misc.: 13 (rope, 4 twine, 5 claw bands, trap tag, shotgun shell, bag of bait)
Food-related plastics: 38 (including 24 food/straw wrappers/packaging!)
Food-related metal/glass: 13 (5 caps, 3 glass scraps, 4 foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 52 (14 plastic bags/scraps, 8 personal care (lids/medicines), 4 toys/scraps, 4 ribbon, wristband, 2 firecrackers, pen cap, umbrella top, bracelet, 5 scraps >1", 11 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 70 (67 filters, 3 packaging)
Paper/wood: 94 (57 firecracker sticks, 5 wood scraps, 32 napkins/random paper)
Misc./unique: 8 (thong underwear, 2 socks, pair of shoes, flipflop, string, piece of fabric)

Wow. Now that's a lot of junk for one week. Largely explained by firecrackers & smokers. But still, an amazing amount of garbage. And a very colorful day, with a mix of yesterday and yesteryear. A couple of the highlights below. First, more of those Canadian lobster claw bands, all pristine.

Found a dozen, or more, since June 2

Too many of these have come in now to be coincidence. Some kind of incident happened in Canadian waters in early May (can't say whether big or small), and we're still seeing the repercussions of it down here. The ocean's all connected after all.

The other highlight: a gray pen cap that looked a -lot- like the weird little firecrackers that have also been washing up throughout the same time period. (Related??)

Spot the pen cap (OK, it's easy)

Hopefully you see now my confusion when the first of these little busted-up pieces of gray hollow plastic came in!

On to Zone S:

19 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 6
Fishing misc.: 1 (fishing rope twine)
Food-related plastics: 0
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 7 (3 bags/scraps, tampon applicator, and tampon (unused), firecracker, 1 scrap <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 5
Paper/wood: 0
Misc./unique: 0

19 finds, against 323 just 150 feet away?? That's not natural. Maybe the condos bordering Zone S have hired cleaning help, or are voluntarily picking up. Dunno. I doubt this stretch is suddenly so clean simply because of encroaching dunes. Anyway, other than that, and yet another tampon applicator (which does seem completely unrelated to the unused tampon and tampon bag also found), Zone S is dull.

So there you go. A wild day, a good day to be a Flotsam Diarist. And more proof that every week may have its share of surprises.

Following the Plastic Triangle

2011-08-01T11:17:00.006-04:00

I want to start this post with a graphic I've used before. But it deserves to be seen again.

From the National Assn. for PET Container Resources
http://www.napcor.com

We keep hearing, from both the cynical and the well-meaning, that the answer to plastic pollution is to recycle more.

We are recycling more. And more. And more.

In the U.S., from 1999 to 2009 we nearly doubled the tonnage of #1 PET plastic we recycled. Almost none of that extra wonderful, "easy-to-recycle" PET stayed in the U.S. 91% of that extra plastic we dutifully recycled was dumped on developing nations, mostly China. The reason is simple. Recycling plastic into safe, strong, useful materials -- while protecting the health of workers & local communities -- is extremely hard, expensive, and rare.

Plastic needs to be sorted extremely finely. One stray #3 plastic bottle can contaminate a batch of 10,000 #1 bottles if melted with them, leaving a product filled with yellowed or black streaks.
Plastic can't be superheated to kill toxins. Instead, recyclers use acids, caustic soda, and chemical slurries to burn off contaminants. The waste is toxic, persistent, and expensive to mitigate.
Bottlers change designs too quickly for recycling technology to keep up. Coke learned this with the epic flame-out of its $50 million bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in South Carolina. That facility couldn't cope with one design change -- a thinner bottle -- and imploded.

So here we are in the U.S. (and Canada), with warehouses bulging and overflowing with recycled plastic that nobody wants. What's a recycler to do?

Sell it to China.

Why would China buy 553,000 metric tons a month of Western plastic waste that nobody wants? Simple. In the U.S. we have a regulatory system that functions. Not perfectly, but it functions. In China, for all intents and purposes, they don't. Even in areas where regulation exists, the cost of fines is less than the cost of compliance. The result is a no-brainer. Recycling plastic in the U.S. is expensive. In China, it's cheap.

11 provinces in China are recognized as major plastic recycling centers: Hebei, Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, Jiangsu, Shandong, Fujian, Henan, Liaoning, and Anhui. The heart of recycling in these provinces are self-described "recycling villages." Places where plastics aren't just a job, they're a way of life.

Here's a little trip through a few Chinese recycling villages. Getting photographs & stories like this isn't easy, and is getting harder as the world takes a closer look. City managers and mayors work to keep Western cameras out of their villages, sometimes threatening -- and using -- violence.

Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province (the nearest province to Hong Kong, and thus one of the largest and busiest recycling centers):

Original photo by D J Clark, found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99425225@N00/1558890678

Fuyang, Anhui Province. A worker stands in toxic rainwater, pulling batteries from plastic trash, separating out the plastic and batteries for recycling.

Original photo by pots455, found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pots/456442389

Ma'anshan, Anhui Province. Untreated wastewater from plastic processing plants dumps straight into the Yangtze River.

This and other photos at: http://www.chinahush.com/
2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/

Wenan County, Hebei Province. A huge importer of Western plastic. This picture is one of countless open-air recycling centers in the county.

Photo and story can be found at:
http://www.ecns.cn/in-depth/2011/07-05/444.shtml

In Wenan, groundwater down to 100 meters is now polluted and undrinkable. Young people no longer pass the army's physical, as they have enlarged livers. The county's sewage treatment plant doesn't operate. That's right: The one sewage treatment plant for 10,000 plastic recycling workshops is only turned on when government officials come by.

The plastic that can't find any reuse often gets a simpler end: an open pit bonfire, spewing black toxic clouds into the air. Such as here, at Guiyu, Guangdong Province, center for plastic and especially e-waste recycling:

This and other brilliant photos at:
http://www.alexhoffordphotography.com/node/2206

Here's a river in Guiyu, Guangdong Province:

Story & photo by Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/
international/en/multimedia/photos/polluted-water/

And it's not just China. Here's a snapshot of another place that collects & processes Western plastics, Khoai, Vietnam:

story & photo at http://vninfogate.com/gate/?module=
newsdetail&newscode=7685

As of now, more than 50% of the plastic we in the U.S. recycle goes to these nations. Where so much of the sorting, remelting, and processing happens under these conditions. This is what plastic recycling really is. This is why plastic recycling is cheap, why we can buy so much cheap plastic garbage in the $1 aisle of big-box stores.

It's sobering to think that one out of every two soda / juice / water bottles each of us puts in our neat, tidy bin is directly responsible for the scenes above. Plastic recycling, 2011 style: Not green. The farthest thing from green.

The Triangle Is a Lie

Collection Report July 7-9, 2011

2011-07-27T21:30:00.001-04:00

7:30AM, and another bright, sunny morning in Maine:

Plus, another fabled 4th of July weekend come and gone. What would the aftermath bring?

This day was a treat: I had with me the Portland Press Herald! Reporter Colleen Stewart and photographer Carl Walsh walked & talked with me for an hour and a half about what I do. They got to see some of the trash on the beach, as well as a big collection of the more "interesting" bits from my past year.

It was a good day to show them around, because most every step held evidence of what our modern world now leaves behind. Here's Zone N:

229 finds:

Building materials: 3 (2 asphalt, 1 brick)
Foam/Styrofoam: 27
Fishing misc.: 18 (6 rope, 4 twine, 2 trap tags, 1 shotgun shell wadding, 5 claw bands)
Food-related plastics: 32 (bottle, 7 bottle caps, 12 food wrappers, 6 straw wrappers, spoon, 3 straws, gum, "Royal Gala Organic" apple sticker)
Food-related metal/glass: 10 (can, 2 bottle caps, 3 glass scraps, 4 foil wrappers)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 34 (7 bag bits, lip balm, aspirin blister pack, 6 firecrackers, 4 beach furniture scraps, glowstick, strapping, sunglasses earpiece, 5 scraps >1", 7 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 55 (53 filters, 2 bits of packaging)
Paper/wood: 47 (8 napkins, 23 misc scraps, 16 firework sticks)
Misc./unique: 3 (scrap of fabric, two flip-flops)

A big day. Nothing terribly unusual -- in fact, an impressively "normal" spread of what the beach on the 4th of July looks like in a small New England community. The only striking thing maybe being:

A bruised, sunburned Canadian lobster
trap tag, at the end of a many-year trek

Talking with Colleen & Carl was fantastic, and went on longer than I'd expected. I had to come back a couple days later to hit Zone S. I brought my daughter with me, and she played happily as she always does at the beach.

Beachcomber-in-Training

And here's what I (and Ruby -- she brought one of the asphalt chunks over with a huge grin) found:

61 finds:

Building materials: 6 (4 asphalt chunks, 2 fence slats)
Foam/Styrofoam: 13
Fishing misc.: 7 (2 rope, 2 twine, 2 claw bands, buoy scrap)
Food-related plastics: 5 (bottle, snack package, bottle cap, straw, wrapper)
Food-related metal/glass: 1 (seaglass)
Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (bag scrap, big melted glob, firecracker, 5 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
Paper/wood: 6
Misc./unique: 1 (fabric scrap)

A small haul, and again, little out of the ordinary. Easily the coolest & most bizarre find was the barnacle-encrusted plastic chunk:

What stories would this thing tell?

Another week down, 290 more pieces of debris added to the collection. Nothing game-changing, but a solid week full of bits & bobs washed up, blown in, and left behind.

Oh, and the Press Herald? They put The Flotsam Diaries on the front page July 11! I love what I do.

Collection Report July 1, 2011, Part II

2011-07-23T10:06:00.001-04:00

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.

Collection Report July 1, 2011, Part I

2011-07-20T16:43:00.007-04:00

Looking through my pictures for my July 1 cleanup, this one lends itself to more of a photoblog. So, without more ado, let's give it a whirl.

If this morning looks about perfect, it was:

The calm before the swarm

And just in time for the 4th of July weekend, an upgrade out in the parking lot:

Semi-private bliss

Yet even with two huge no-smoking signs, some people simply will not get it:

Oh, maybe it was just a suggestion?

But looking beyond the manmade marring, something interesting is happening in Bay View beach.

Reclamation

Sea levels creep slowly up. Development & erosion take their toll. Yet Bay View's dunes are bucking the trend. They're actually moving back onto the sand! In busier Zone N, it's just occasional tufts. But in Zone S, the new dune layout has been formalized with a fresh fence, 12-15 feet closer to the ocean than last year! So Zone S's usable beachfront is compressed. In fact, high tides now mostly eliminate the beach there. It'll be interesting to see if Zone S trash plummets.

Neat ecology aside, this was a day filled with other surprises. Not least being this:

You're a long way from home

This plastic disc is one of 4.3 million released into the Merrimack River on March 11 from the Hooksett, New Hampshire wastewater treatment plant in a big screw-up. Since then, they've been found from Maine to Rhode Island. This one is the first found as far north as Saco. It probably found a mini-gyre off Cape Cod, spun counter-clockwise, & got shot out toward Saco Bay. Many others have likely picked up the Gulf Stream southeast of Cape Cod, and will start washing up on European shores by late summer.

Note: This disk was in the ocean for nearly four months and is pristine. Another piece of plastic washed up nearby, not nearly as pristine.

Rotten to the core

This squirt bottle nozzle is crusted, faded, brittle, cloudy, and ancient. However long ago it was lost, it wasn't a few weeks, or even four months. When plastics get in the ocean, they will survive a long, -long- time.

Moving along, I (1) added yet another perfect beach toy to Ruby's growing collection:

Will probably open a re-sale shop this fall

(2) wondered if the rest of this is now in an endangered marine mammal's gut:

What goes up, comes down

(3) pondered just how many tons of this material have been lost to the Gulf of Maine:

Fishing rope is polypropylene, and persists for centuries

and (4) reflected on today's big battles between powerful industry lobbyists and grass-roots common sense:

Hard as it is to believe, I'm still betting
on common sense in the end

Photoblog: off. Amazing what we can find & learn strolling the beach, when we really start to look.

Speaking of which, I'll follow this up shortly with the actual numbers for the week. They're pretty astounding. And not in a good way.

Collection Report June 20-23, 2011

2011-07-14T14:22:00.002-04:00

My first collection report of Year 2!

Bay View beach. Saco, Maine. Monday, June 20. 8:10AM

Low 60s and bright sun

A day of the beautiful:

A world in bloom

And ugly:

Balloons that go up come down, like
this one, floated in on rockweed

And typical:

A very common brand at Bay View

As Al the Trashpaddler in Massachusetts says to this company that packs almost everything in plastic and styrofoam (or indeed both at the same time), "What Are You Thinkin'?"

So what would grace the shores on this first week of a new collection year? Zone N:

194 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 49
Fishing misc.: 21 (5 rope, 5 rope twine, 7 claw bands, trap tag, trap clamp, 2 shotgun shell waddings)
Food-related plastics: 20 (bottle cap, 2 cups, 12 wrappers, 3 straws, 2 chewing gum)
Food-related metal/glass: 4 (2 bottle caps, 2 foil wrappers)
Non-food/unknown plastics: 21 (5 bag scraps, 4 balloons, 3 strappings, silly band, backpack cinch, 7 scraps <1", 2 scraps >1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 63 (57 filters, 2 plastic tips, 3 cigar protectors, cig pack)
Paper/wood: 13 (7 wrappers, 6 scraps/napkins)
Misc./unique: 1 (rubber offcut)

A pretty big, very summer-y haul. The cigarettes, food plastics, and styrofoam are all mostly local, recent drops. But plenty is still washing in. Not likely that a beachgoer brought these:

The fishing gear

or these:

Shredded & tortured

On June 23, I returned to finish up the week, visiting Zone S. Here's what I uncovered there:

113 finds:

Building materials: 2 (wooden slats/blocks)
Foam/Styrofoam: 44
Fishing misc.: 18 (9 rope bits, 3 rope twine, 2 trap tags, 3 claw bands, 1 tiny buoy fragment)
Food-related plastics: 8 (bottle cap, 5 wrappers, brittle milk jug handle, six-pack ring)
Food related metal/glass: 4 (sea glass)
Non-food/unknown plastics: 13 (2 bags/scraps, balloon, tampon applicator, toy google eye, 2 scraps >1", 6 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 21 (20 filters, 1 bit of packaging)
Paper/wood: 3
Misc./unique: 0

Another good bit of fishing gear, including my first 2011 trap tag. (Dark gray this year.) A whole mess of styrofoam bits (most likely blown down from Zone N and points north). And oh joy:

Another tampon applicator

That brings my total of those this year to "officially too many." As with all the others, it probably entered the Bay from a river after being flushed down a toilet.

What happens in a drain, or a gutter, doesn't stay there. It's all heading to the ocean. One way or another.

The Difference a Few Feet Makes

2011-07-12T16:57:00.001-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I finished my main review of my first full year at Bay View. It was eye-opening.

Now, I've taken the time to compare the two zones I work. This has been even more eye-opening.

As a quick refresher, every week I walk two distinct zones at Bay View, I call them "Zone N"(orth) and "Zone S"(outh).

My two zones at Bay View

Each zone is 250 feet long, each starts at the dune line and goes down to the terrace, halfway between low & high tide lines. The big difference? Zone N is right near the parking lot & beach access. It's the popular spot, where all the beachgoers congregate. Zone S, on the other hand, sits beyond a private patio area that encroaches onto the beach. The patio acts like a line of demarcation. A few folks wander down past it to spend time in Zone S, but not many.

In Maine, beach season is pretty much only the summer, maybe a little in the spring. In autumn and especially winter, only the hardiest of solace-seekers hits a Maine beach. So my question when I started was, will there be a noticeable difference in debris between the zones, and will it even out over the winter when the beachgoers have gone?

Well, here's my charts for the four seasons:

Summer 2010

Autumn 2010

Winter 2010-11

Spring 2011

In the summer, the tourist season, Zone N blew Zone S away. This isn't surprising. And in fact, much of the difference between the two could easily be accounted for by beachgoer trash -- cigarettes, food packets, umbrella bits, toys, flipflops.

But look at autumn, winter, and spring. All of them still show a big difference between Zones N & S. In fact, 2 to 2 1/2 times more in Zone N for each season. What does this mean?

Breakdown of finds by zone & category

Well, maybe debris got buried in the summer, and re-exposed by winter storms? A dirtier Zone N in summer may mean more junk uncovered there in winter. But much of what showed up in winter had obviously washed in from far away. Tons of fishing debris, sun-bleached plastic, plastic fouled by marine life. And of course, no cigarette butts. If they'd been buried in summer, they surely would have shown up in winter.

No, what's happening here is weird. Two zones, same beach, same climate & weather, separated by barely 150 feet (if that). And yet during the winter, Zone N consistently doubles the amount of debris washed up.

Why?

There's a rock outcrop just north of Zone N that's exposed at low tide. Maybe it changes the current? The beach at Zone S seems slightly narrower, slightly steeper. Not drastically, but maybe enough? What about the trees? You can see from the satellite image that Zone N backs onto open ground, while Zone S is tree-studded. Does that blunt the seabreeze and change the flotsam?

Whatever the reason, I know this: If you think you know how your beach works, take the briefest of strolls up or down it. And then check again.

I love this stuff.

Why?

2011-07-09T13:38:00.002-04:00

I was recently asked by somebody, "Why do you do this? Go to the beach, pick up trash, week after week?"

That somebody was the mirror. A face that I've long known mouthed the words. Why pick up another trash bag, and visit the beach another time? What exactly did I hope to accomplish?

In the deep Pacific, some one out of every 10 fish now has plastic in its gut. In the far wild north, 85% of Arctic fulmars fly with plastic inside them. Fish in just one of the world's five ocean gyres eat 12-24,000 tons of plastic a year. A year.

The world smokes 5.5 trillion cigarettes each year. If even 90% make it to the landfill, that still means 55 billion filters littered to the ground/ocean. Each year. 1744 toxic, persistent, plastic cigarette butts littered to the ground every second of every day.

Here in Maine, our lobster industry loses tens of thousands of vinyl-coated steel lobster traps to the deep sea every year. 70,000 in 2010 alone! Each trap, as the steel slowly rusts, sheds its vinyl in a thousand+ fish-bite sized bits. Storms belch the vinyl -- and the sharp, rusted steel -- up all over our beautiful coastline; ruined hulks of trap litter islands up and down the Maine Island Trail.

I've picked up nearly 9,000 pieces of garbage from 1/10th of a mile of coastline, 80% plastic. Maine has 3,500 miles of coastline. And the world still makes ever more, more, & more plastic. Plastic recycling just downcycles the waste, forcing still more virgin plastic to replace the recycled products. Plastic bag lobbyists fight common-sense taxes & fees; bottling companies fight common-sense bottle-return bills. Convenience & profit of the moment rule the day. And the ocean continues to fill with plastic.

So back to my question. What can a guy, a trash bag, and a camera do to change any of this? I don't know.

But I took my daughter to Bay View today.

The inheritor (with growing collection of found beach toys!)

This is Ruby. She is four years old. There is no place in this world where she feels happier or freer than at the beach. Her birthright -- like all of ours -- was a chance to feel the timelessness of the sand & surf. Not to have the modern world swirl around her with every high tide. That birthright hangs in the balance, because of the choices of my & my parents' generation.

Ruby will inherit the world that I leave to her. I have to leave it better than I found it. That's my job.

So today, while she was making sand castles, I picked up my garbage bag and camera, and I walked the beach.

And you know what? On our way to this spot, there had been a plastic cup littered at the tide line. When our beach time was over, and we were walking back to the car, that cup was gone, thrown in the trash by a kindred spirit. Whatever it is you care about in this world, you're not alone.

Collection Report June 7, 2011

2011-07-03T15:20:00.001-04:00

Catching up again. The meat of this report already went into my final tally for the year, but I still want to get it written up, if briefly. So. June 7, 9:15AM. And it seems that Parks & Rec got a little creative with the log forest that rolled in during late May.

A totem pole?

Weather was slightly cooler for this week. But there was still plenty of evidence of beachgoers. What evidence?

Bonfires

The burn-it-all ritual
(See the aluminum? It does burn away)

A poor showing

That last shot isn't just ugly. It's dangerous:

How much plastic/foil is
now shredding a seabird's belly?

So there we go. Beach weather, for the most part, is back. With all its fun, sun, and sundries. What does that mean for this, the very last week of Year 1 in my Bay View tally? First, Zone N:

146 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 59!
Fishing misc.: 3 (claw band, lobster trap coating, twine from rope)
Food-related plastics: 8 (straw, burnt bit, 2 bottle caps, oil/sauce cup, straw wrapper, pretzel bag, Hillshire Farm cheese wrapper)
Food-related metal/glass: 14 (5 bottles, 1 bottle neck, 5 cans, 3 bottle caps)
Non-food/unknown plastics: 13 (game target, bag, film, dessicant, pen cap, faded toy crab, price-tag tie, 6 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 32 (26 filters, 1 plastic tip, chewing tobacco box, 4 cigar ends)
Paper/wood: 14 (Bud Lime box, 11 tissues/napkins, 2 toy price/name tags)
Misc./unique: 3 (2 smore handles, string)

Where could 59 pieces of styrofoam come from?? Well, 52 seem to have come from this one thing:

Crushed cooler

Out of one, many.

The styrofoam scraps and clamshells; beer bottles, beer cans, cigarettes stuffed neatly into the sand; straws, wrappers, and price tags -- This is a full-on summer signature.

Which, I suppose, is little surprise. So what happened down the shore at Zone S?

57 finds:

Building materials: 0
Foam/Styrofoam: 26
Fishing misc.: 1 (claw band)
Food-related plastics: 1 (coffee cup lid)
Food-related metal/glass: 0
Non-food/unknown plastics: 16 (4 firecracker/flare caps, 2 strings, 2 bits of fuzz, 2 bag/film scraps, tiny ball/bead, 5 scraps <1")
Cigarette filters/plastics: 9
Paper/wood: 4 (cup, 3 napkin scraps)
Misc./unique: 0

A wild difference between Zones N and S. Pretty good proof of where the people spent their time the past week. Yet all the blown-in styrofoam suggests just how far lightweight plastic will travel given half a chance.

All told, this last week of my Year 1 at Bay View ties things up and brings them nicely full circle. Summer is back. And I find myself missing the magical solitude of winter on a Maine beach.

Year 2, here we come!

Reply from Tom's of Maine

2011-06-28T20:03:00.013-04:00

Last week I received a response from Tom's of Maine to my letter of June 9 about their switch to plastic toothpaste tubes. Reprinted here in full (scroll to read):

June 16, 2011

Dear Harold,

Thank you for your letter -- not only for your commitment to the environment and sustainability, but also for your willingness to share your concerns. Although we are unhappy to hear you are disappointed with our new toothpaste tube material, we do track consumer comments closely, and are especially interested to hear how our valued users feel about this new packaging.

As you can probably imagine, switching to our new laminate tube was a very big decision for us. The aluminum tubes had been a part of our company for over 40 years, and we only made the decision to switch after giving the subject lengthy, holistic consideration. This included commissioning an environmental study from the University of Michigan which compared the environmental impact of the old aluminum tube vs. the new laminate material. The results were presented in terms of life-cycle energy, greenhouse gas emissions, acidification potential, carcinogen production, eutrophication, solid waste, and air and water emissions and indicated that in general, the old aluminum tubes had two to three times greater environmental impact than the laminate tube.

That being said, we recognize that these laminate tubes are not a perfect option. Although the tubes are recyclable as #7 plastic, we share your concern about them ending up in the trash. We've identified a partner who will recycle and reuse the material as packaging products and are currently inviting consumers with limited recycling options to save up their tubes and return them back to us. We are happy to reimburse any postage paid with new Tom's product. We are also investigating additional ways to make it easier for consumers to return these tubes back to us here in Maine.

The sustainability of our packaging is a critical component of our Stewardship Model. We originally chose aluminum because of this commitment, and kept it as a primary consideration in making the change to laminate. But we are actively interested in opportunities to improve this sustainability, and believe that consumers such as you may be our greatest resource. We appreciate your feedback, and if you uncover additional relevant research or potential packaging options, we hope you will pass them our way!

In fact, seeing as that you live just up the coast, we'd be more than happy to meet with you in person to discuss this further -- either now or in the future.

Thank you again for your feedback. We wish you the best of health!

Sincerely,
Bridget M. Burns
Citizen's Advocacy Representative

My open response.

Dear Ms. Burns,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. But you've missed the thrust. My concern isn't plastic ending up in trash; it's plastic ending up in the ocean. Ever more of it. Which is happening now. Today. You asked for research. I've just completed a year-long survey of the pollution reaching my Bay View beach in Saco. Of the 8,456 pieces of litter & garbage left behind or washed in, 78-80% were plastic. Persistent plastic that doesn't go away. Ever.

Your old material, aluminum, is a closable loop. Even food-fouled aluminum can be melted, the dross skimmed off, and the aluminum placed back on shelves in weeks. Better still, it can even be recovered from landfills, often at percentages higher than from freshly mined bauxite ore.

The plastic in your new laminate isn't a closable loop. It's a downward spiral, requiring virgin plastic to replace what is bought from store shelves. Depending on whether Tom's is willing to pay a premium for partially-recycled product, you are using anywhere from 60 to 100% virgin plastic in each tube. (Information gathered from this article on plastic barrier laminate.) Your switch adds to our modern addiction to more, ever more, virgin plastic.

And much of it will get littered, one way or another, despite anyone's good intentions.

Littered aluminum degrades back to the stuff of soil & bedrock. Plastic doesn't. It persists. For centuries. Plastics also accumulate -- and leach -- toxins. Plastics foul pristine beaches and fill the bellies of animals that have never seen a human being, killing them through poison or starvation.

This plastic all came from the gut of ONE dead sea turtle
(from http://www.seaturtle.org)

Does your environmental report consider end-of-life factors like this? If not, it's incomplete. There's also the light-weighting argument for plastic over aluminum. Let's assume that a filled aluminum tube really is significantly heavier than a filled plastic tube. Does the report consider the entire supply stream (and carbon footprint) of virgin plastic, from synthesis to pellets to formulation to shipping? Or the excellent closed-loop recyclability of aluminum? Or the supply stream & footprint of that recycled aluminum? After all, there are many aluminum foundries in New England alone, practically in Tom's back yard.

If, after all that, plastic still seems cheaper on the front end, please look again at that photograph above. That's what the end of the plastic life cycle looks like. That is not science fiction, or melodrama. That is today.

So, again, Tom's of Maine, I believe you care. And that you want to do good while doing well. But this change to plastic toothpaste tubes is the wrong choice. It will leave its legacy swirling around our oceans, and washing up on our shores, for lifetimes to come.

Please be a true leader, and buck the plastic trend.