Collection Report Oct 7, 2010

As promised, the collection report from October 7. From my first steps on the beach, I knew the majority of my finds were going to be fence slats. I just didn't know how many:

Zone N

Zone S

But even with roaring waves & brutal winds, there were plenty of other goodies as well. Here's Zone N:

252 finds:

• Building material: 104 (fence slats)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 50 (!!)
• Fishing misc.: 9 (6 bits of rope, two trap tags, 1 lobster trap, heavily bashed)
• Food-related plastics: 6
• Food-related metal/glass: 5
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 28 (inc. balloon, piece of another balloon, "Tattoo" tag, white bow, happy face, umbrella base, and a bandaid)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 41 (25 local & 16 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 4
• Misc./unique: 5 (quarter -- who says this doesn't pay??, firework bit, 2 blobs of candle wax, half of plastic recycling tub washed in from New Brunswick, Canada)

Couldn't quite believe how many scraps of styrofoam I kept finding. Everywhere I looked, more little balls of polystyrene hiding amid the kelp, or down in some tiny hollow where the wind couldn't reach them.

Foam mix-and-match

Plus, of course, all the usual suspects...

Banner day for misc. plastics

On to Zone S:

186 finds:

• Building material: 133
• Foam/Styrofoam: 25
• Fishing misc.: 5 (3 buoys/buoy scraps, 2 bits of rope)
• Food-related plastics: 3
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (rotted scrap of aluminum can)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 10 (inc. two toggles, balloon scrap, magazine packaging?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 8 (2 local + 3 "floaters" + 3 cigar ends)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (half of a Zodiac XDC deepwater inflatable boat -- not brought home!)

The foam frenzy of Zone N carried (unshockingly given the wind) through Zone S. It brought polystyrene bits both small, and not so small.

More foam fiesta -- trending blue in Zone S

Some storm ripped rope straight thru yellow buoy

All told, on October 7 I collected 438 pieces of debris. Even taking out the 237 bits of fencing, the rest of the numbers are still topsy-turvy from the height of summer: almost no food plastics, compared to 75 bits of foam & styrofoam. On the other hand, there were constants too: the ever-present cigarette, the colorful scraps of plastic that were all once intended to make life a little brighter, easier, more interesting.

When I started this so many months ago, I never really expected to find half a boat. But I find that little surprises me anymore. If man has made it, a specimen of it is probably in the sea, right now. Just waiting to surface again when the time is right.

All more proof that a beach without sunbathers is still daily visited by the waste of the modern world.

Collection Report Sept 29, 2010

Wednesday, September 29 at Bay View beach, Saco. A late start, and a sunny but cool mid-morning.

Never tire of this view

The last memories of August and early September storms were eroding away.

Sand cliff, a last ghost of a former storm

Leaving behind, as always, more than first meets the eye. Here is Zone N:

167 finds:

• Building material: 1
• Foam/styrofoam: 16
• Fishing misc.: 3 (2 bits of rope, flare shell)
• Food-related plastics: 24 (inc. sandwich baggie, ketchup packet, 5 bottle caps, faded bit of "Nik-L-Nip" wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 12
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 31 (inc. shotgun shell plug (?), OTC medicine seal, "remove plastic" scrap, scrap of faded orange sphere, latex glove, balloon tip, bandaid)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 69 (57 local drops + 11 likely floaters + 1 plastic)
• Paper/wood: 9
• Misc./unique: 2 (thin rope, Bic lighter)

Not a lot to get excited about, perhaps.

Millinery union label

Always colorful scraps

Really don't want to know

Zone S is still, predictably, bringing in less stuff. Though with fewer beachgoers bringing less food to Zone N, the ratios are starting to look much closer between both zones now.

58 finds:

• Building material: 2 (fence slats)
• Foam/styrofoam: 11
• Fishing misc.: 1 (claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 7
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (bit of sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 20 (17 locals + 3 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 6
• Misc./unique: 2 (bit of string and scrap of antenna wire)

At most, this week is a reminder that the end of tourist season doesn't mean the end of a fouled beach. Even if the numbers are off their peak.

For those not terribly moved by what washed up for this collection, wait til I post October 6th's. You might not going to believe your eyes.

An Interlude

Before moving ahead, there's a little housecleaning to do, stuff that I've come across that deserves a place in the diaries.

To be honest, a couple of my recent trips to Ocean Park didn't seem so enlightening at first. When you go to the beach one morning in mid-May and find:

...there's not a whole lot to add. Midnight party, cheap booze, story of mankind for at least 5,000 years.

And when you go a couple days after Memorial Day weekend and find:

...it's hardly surprising.

Still, as I've learned, sometimes those cases you'd normally dismiss are exactly the ones you should look at. Take picture number two -- there's actually something there to work with. For one thing, there's context. This isn't old trash that randomly arrived over months or years. This was as crisp and fresh as if it were dropped a day or two before, because it was. It's a time capsule of Memorial Day Weekend 2010. There are stories here: dates, families, friends, kicking off the beginning of Maine summer in traditional fashion. And leaving evidence strewn across the sand in their wake.

A nosh, or pick-me-up, or maybe part of lunch:

Maybe a burst of fresh breath, or a treat for a well-behaved kid:

A beach game, possibly bought that very morning at the local store:

My favorite - an apparently unsuccessful attempt at a love connection:

And of course, cigarette butts:

How'd each of these things get left behind? Thoughtlessness? Ignorance? Spite? Blown out of reach by a gust of wind? Picked out of a trash can by a scavenging seagull? Don't know. Maybe all of the above.

What I do know is that only two of the things I picked up would actually biodegrade over the next several months/years: the notecard, and the wooden popsicle sticks.

What about the others? Well, a couple examples:

* Cigarette filters: made of thousands of fibers of cellulose acetate (a plastic). Breakdown time, about 10 years (many of the toxins trapped in them persist in the ground much longer). Total number of cigarettes smoked in 1998: 5.6 trillion; total weight of disposed filters in 1998: 2.1 billion lbs. Number of littered cigarette butts picked up worldwide by Ocean Conservancy Clean-up Day Volunteers, one day -- September 19, 2009: 2,189,252.

* Cape Cod chip bag: made up of two layers of #5 plastic with bonding layer of #4 plastic, inner film aluminum-metalized (found this info by e-mailing Cape Cod customer service; yes, really!). Non-recyclable. Breakdown time: centuries, possibly millennia. Annual retail sales of potato chips just in the U.S.: $6 billion. At an average of $1 per bag, # of these bags thrown out each year in the U.S. alone: 6 billion.

The peanut butter bag, Kit-Kat bag, candy wrappers, game bag -- all are also made of plastics or plastic composites that will persist for centuries, or longer, if not disposed of or recycled.

Plastics are cheap to produce & convenient. The flipside is that trillions of single-use bags & containers -- and cigarette filters -- are made every year. Plastics can be made very thin & lightweight. The flipside is that they blow away down a windy beachfront very easily. Plastics are durable & impermeable and good at keeping food fresh. The flipside is that once a piece gets lost in the sand, or blown out of a car window, or dragged from a trash bin by a scavenger, it doesn't go away.

So really, if I don't have all the answers about it now, not to worry. There's plenty of time to figure it out.

My photojournalist daughter hard at work