Collection Report Jan 9, 2012

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.

Look What the Current Dragged In, Part III

Last year I spent a couple posts (first and second) looking at how ocean currents move in my little corner of the world. I learned that Saco Bay is fed by the Labrador Current from the northeast. Which explained why Canadian lobster trap tags and claw bands sometimes wash up on my shore.

Recovered today, after a 150+ mile trip

Those studies taught me that the complex Gulf of Maine is really, in an elegant term I just saw, a "Sea Within a Sea." A system of mini-gyres, upwellings, deep basins, river outflows that comes together to make a rich & vibrant ecosystem all its own. I also learned about the wealth of resources available to a budding Flotsam Diarist in trying to make sense of it all. So when today's walk along the beach revealed a minor mystery, I knew where to turn.

What was the mystery? A batch of lobster claw bands, all but one of them absolutely pristine. Soft, supple, full, unscuffed, unbitten. Including the far-traveling "Wild Canada" band.

Only 1 of the 8 was old & battered (back right)

In my year at Bay View, I've never seen so many fresh bands come in at once -- they usually are a mix of new & old, pliable & brittle.

The Canadian band has a cargo of young marine life stuck to its inside, proof that it had actually made the journey by sea. But it, with its friends, was so fresh. How'd it get here so fast?

Enter NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center and its Drifter Program. For nearly a decade, students at Maine universities have been working with NEFSC to release drifters into the Gulf of Maine (and elsewhere -- sometimes far afield), then tracking their motion. The data is delivered real-time, and is accessible to anyone with the Internet. As it turns out, just two weeks ago, a batch of drifters was released from Downeast Maine -- very near to where a Canadian lobster boat could have been fishing, actually. And those drifters are still afloat, and sending their data back. The image below came from the tracking page literally 15 minutes ago!

("Saco Bay" and "Jonesport" notations are my own)

They show the drifters just zipping along SW down the coast. Within a week, the dark blue one had almost entered Casco Bay (just north of Saco Bay). The dark red one hovered at the entrance to Saco Bay briefly just a day or two ago before heading back eastward. Clearly, things like lost claw bands could have made the journey just as fast; and the currents/winds were perfect for getting them into Saco Bay and onto the beach at Bay View. The proof is in the picture.

I may never know precisely where this Canadian lobster band (and its freshly dropped friends) originated. But thanks to the awesome work of a lot of dedicated folks, I can tell you this: When the conditions are right, something dropped 150 or more miles away could wash up to your feet within just a couple weeks. And that's pretty cool to know.

It's a shame that there's litter in the ocean. But if it's there, it would be a worse shame not to try to learn something from it.

What's In a Name?

(Condensed version of this post available here as a FaceBook note.)

This week's 5th International Marine Debris Conference got me thinking.

I used to tell friends that I was concerned about "marine debris." Their eyes would glaze over. They were lost, before the conversation even started. You see, the term doesn't sound like the problem. "Marine debris" sounds like driftwood, kelp. A river choked by fallen trees from a landslide. The term fails at its #1 job: naming. We put names on things to make them real, to make them understandable. To make them fixable. How do you fix "marine debris"?

Another term exists: "plastic pollution." 70-90% of the manmade waste that washes up on beaches is some kind of plastic (see p. 26 of the report). Daily life revolves around plastic; thus, most of what ends up in the ocean is plastic.

More critically, the material that will persist in the ocean is plastic. Cotton, wool, paper, and wood rot. Aluminum & steel oxidize, returning to the building blocks of bedrock. Glass, too, breaks down. Its surface hydrates. The molecules that bond the silica together are replaced by hydrogen, and eventually it breaks back down to silica -- sand.

Plastics don't break down. They break up, into ever smaller shards. Nothing in nature is known to break down plastic. Alkalis don't. Acids don't. Microbes don't. Sunlight doesn't. Oxygen doesn't. Quite simply, plastic persists. For centuries, millennia -- nobody knows. Worse, much plastic is buoyant -- especially #2, #4, #5, and styrofoam (which is simply puffed-out #6 plastic). It looks like food to marine life, and is ingested as food by marine life. Such as the turtle that ingested this:

All of this was found in -one- dead turtle
http://www.seaturtle.org/imagelib/?photo=5456

The "great garbage patches" in the world aren't a swirl of tin cans. Or library books. Or car engines. They're a swirl of plastic. Plastic that kills animals by the hundreds of thousands. Plastic that collects hydrophobic (water-hating) toxins such as persistent organic pollutants in the ocean, concentrating them at up to one million times the concentration of the surrounding seawater.

So, why wasn't this conference called the International Plastic Pollution Conference? For some insight, look at the list of sponsors:

In the highest bracket of sponsorship is none other than the American Chemistry Council -- the plastics industry. The plastics industry has links with websites like Save the Plastic Bag, which misrepresent facts to downplay the environmental impact of single-use plastics. The industry spends millions of dollars fighting laws that would even slightly tax & oversee use of plastic bags. The industry came up with the use of the "chasing arrows" symbol to make plastic recycling look like a closed loop, when it's nothing of the sort. The industry is now suing a maker of sustainable, organic shopping bags (Andy Keller, see "other bag news" section) for daring to lay out the facts.

The ACC does not gain by the term "plastic pollution" becoming forefront in people's minds. It doesn't gain by having to support any of the burden for the safe & responsible end of its products' lives. It doesn't gain when consumers use less single-use plastic. The ACC does gain by shaping the discussion in its favor.*

NOAA and UNEP seem to agree. Thus, the 5th International Marine Debris Conference. A place where, in the words of Plastic Pollution Coalition co-founder Daniella Russo, "there is the one who Must Not Be Named... Plastic Pollution."^

A second top-tier sponsor of the conference was Coca-Cola. In 2010, Coca-Cola Amatil, which runs operations in much of the South Pacific, celebrated a large rise in plastic-bottle sales to Indonesia (see p. 11 of report). They also touted a 30% increased capacity to supply Indonesia with more of the plastic bottles. Indonesia has no waste management infrastructure capable of dealing with the increase. It can't handle what it already has. The picture below is the Citarum River in Indonesia, from late 2008.

From the Guardian newspaper photo essay found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2008/

dec/05/water-pollution-citarum-river

What is that? Marine debris, or plastic pollution? Who is shaping the very words that we use to understand & describe what is happening to our world?

---

* For an impressive, and well-researched article on the reach of the plastics industry, it would be hard to beat "Is the Plastic Industry the New Tobacco Industry," by Amy Westervelt, published March 23, 2011.

^ This quote was reported by the Plastic Pollution Coalition's Facebook page on March 24, 2011.

Spotlight - NOAA Marine Debris program

Research is a funny little business.

It starts so small. A simple question, like "How did this widget end up on the beach?" Just a fragile, ephemeral thought. The kind of thing that can easily go *poof* back out of existence if not nurtured.

But if you're persistent -- and lucky -- you just may wend your way to an answer. Or, more excitingly, more questions. More avenues of thought. And if you're really lucky, those new questions will lead you to other people who have asked the same kinds of questions, and have knowledge to share. People making a difference. People who can help you learn how to make a difference.

From time to time the Diaries will take a moment to give a shout to a person or organization that's making a real difference. Today I want to introduce you to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association's Marine Debris Program.

NOAA describes its mission as "to understand and predict changes in Earth's environment and conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation's economic, social, and environmental needs." Its Marine Debris program came into effect in December, 2006. The program coordinates and leads a number of national projects including dealing with abandoned vessels, derelict traps & pots, coastal cleanups, as well as just gleaning basic information. (It's remarkable -- and scary -- how little science yet knows about just how much trash is out there, how fast it's collecting, and what its long-term effects are.)

For a Flotsam Diarist like me, the program's Web site provides a wealth of information and resources for learning just what marine debris is, including handouts, posters, brochures, classroom activity books, etc. They also maintain a blog and publish a weekly report with news & links. Beyond that, their outreach program is remarkable for the encouragement it offers, and the material that it will send to a regular guy with a passion to get the word out:

So a big thank you to NOAA and the Marine Debris program! A top site for anyone who's ever seen trash washed up on the beach and wanted to do something about it.