A Comprehensive Breakdown of Bay View's Debris, Year 1

My last collection report from Year 1, the June 7 report, is pending. But the numbers are tabulated and I wanted to get this published.

I can't quite believe that it's been a full year already at Bay View. I'm stunned both by what I've learned and how much there still is to learn. But I'm also very encouraged by the numbers that have been coming back. Some assumptions have been validated, others have been definitively blown apart. Most important, there are clear trends & compelling leads to follow, now that Year 2 has begun. And real points of discussion to bring to the wider flotsam-fighting world. I'm pretty chuffed.

So, details: From June 15, 2010 through June 7, 2011, I managed to collect at the beach 43 out of 52 weeks. (4 off-weeks were due to persistent foul weather, 2 due to being out of town, 3 due to overcommitments during the week.) All told, I picked up 8,456 individual pieces of manmade litter. It was quite a year.

Now, without further ado, the charts.

78-80% of the grand total consisted of some form of plastic

The number one culprit in terms of quantity over the full year was cigarette butts. The toxins in and persistence of these packets of plastic fiber are a subject of many Flotsam Diaries posts, as well as a three-part experiment. They will surely be the subject of future posts too.

After cigarette butts, the next largest litter source is nonfood/un-ID'd plastics. This is a catch-all category, as it includes things like beach umbrella bases, as well as tiny fragments & bag scraps that could have come from anything. Surprisingly, fishing gear beat out food-related plastics for third place. It's clear that the Gulf of Maine's fishing industry significantly contributes to the plastic pollution of the ocean & its coasts. What's less clear is what, if anything, can or should be done to mitigate. The industry is already one of the most regulated in the state & nation. A discussion for a later date.

Next in the list is food plastic & foam/styrofoam -- things most likely identifiable as local drops by beachgoers or, less often, from local garbage bins. Non-plastic items are a clear minority. Which only makes sense. Paper melts back to nothing; wood rots back to nothing; glass and steel settle to the seafloor and either erode or rust back to nothing. But plastic lives on and on.

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Overall, these trends are fairly consistent with data found at such places as the Ocean Conservancy. But rather than one annual clean-up, The Flotsam Diaries is all about weekly cleanups. So I can take my data a step further, breaking down by season. And doing so shows some startling, and eye-opening, trends.

Summer's trend is cigarette-heavy

Over the summer, cigarette butts accounted for a full 2/5 of all the litter generated at Bay View! Saco has a no-smoking policy in its public parks, and the lifeguard station announced the beach as a "Tobacco-Free Area." But clearly the patrons weren't obeying.

Tied for distant second are food plastics and nonfood/unidentifiable plastics. The numbers of both are formidable each week at Bay View, but don't vie with cigarette waste. Fishing debris, near the bottom at 3%, may be misleading. Colorful pieces of rope, lobster trap tags, and buoy pieces can make unique souvenirs; much of that debris may have ended up going home with beachgoers.

Cooler weather brings a drop in cigarettes & food plastics

Good or fair weather remains for many weeks after Labor Day, and local beach debris still accumulates in the autumn. But cigarette & food plastic percentages show a significant drop. A late hurricane and later autumn storms cast a good deal of unidentifiable plastic upon the beach, as well as scattering asphalt chunks and wooden fence slats among the sands. (It remains to be seen if I'll keep including asphalt chunks in weekly totals. The material is so old & inert, it's become basically part of the rocky substrate to the beach. It's not clear if it aids or skews the record of what should be considered manmade debris.)

Winter turns debris counts on their heads

The winter record is what really surprised me. First, I had originally assumed that many of the cigarette butts were washing in. However, the winter signature shows that when beachgoers disappear at Bay View, cigarettes disappear. There is almost no recognizable cigarette waste washing into Zone N & Zone S at Bay View. It's local drops. The same is true of sytrofoam. Whatever happens to foam when it gets out on the ocean, it doesn't wash up in recognizable form at Bay View. What's there is local.

On the other hand, the % of fishing gear skyrocketed. Degraded rope, claw bands and trap tags, shredded bits of vinyl trap coating -- all washed up by the hundreds over the winter months. Do winter storms bring it in? Or does a lack of visitors mean that the colorful bits stay on the beach longer?

Also, un-ID'd/nonfood plastics washed up in amazing amounts. Many had been pulverized by wave action; many had marine organisms like bryozoans growing on them. Some may originally have been food-related, say tableware, but not identifiable anymore.

At any rate, the winter record shows the extent of plastics that now float in the Gulf of Maine. Some seemed to have been in the water for a very long time. Also, winter seems to be the time when the sea disgorges much of its battered debris back onto Bay View.

Spring brings its own mysteries

Springtime brought the least debris. Even after heavy storms & high winds, little washed in. This was true even of organics. Where there's seaweed, there's plastic; yet the big storms of early spring brought in little of either. Is there something about the coastal currents of early spring as fresh meltwater rushes out of rivers & mixes with the ocean? Worth a look.

Late in spring, the organics, with their plastic cargo, started returning. Also, foam & styrofoam started arriving in big #s. Probably the result of being blown out of local garbage bins, or careless early beachgoers; none of the foam showed signs of long-distance sea travel. A big % of the whole spring haul came from the last couple of weeks, the post-Memorial Day binge of beachgoing, with its attendant debris.

Overall, the ebb & flow of litter over the course of the year was quite remarkable. The amount of long-floating debris washed up from winter storms was shocking. The relative cleanliness of the beach/ocean for a few months afterward was also a surprise. And it provides an opportunity. A program of winter cleanups, when weather permits, may help do two major things: (1) Educate the public on the problem, as they will see that seaside pollution isn't all just local beachgoers & recent drops; (2) Possibly make a significant difference in the overall cleanliness of our coast & coastal waters, at least in the short term. Obviously the only true, sustainable answer is to stop polluting the ocean in the first place. But the more that organizations can bring the problem to light, the more willpower there should be to do something at the source.

This has been a remarkable year. I'm excited to have made these discoveries, and had a chance to bring them to the public. On June 20 I started my second year collecting & reporting on the litter that arrives at this small, quiet local beach. I'm already excited for June 2012, when I can compare Year 1 to Year 2.

Thanks to all for the support, advice, and ideas. It's been a lot of fun making new friends, learning new things, and trying to make a difference. Looking forward to keeping it up!

For those interested, below is the data, week-by-week, of what I collected from June 15, 2010 - June 7, 2011. Would love any & all thoughts.

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3

Acidification and Disintegration, Part II

Yesterday, I set up the issue: the ocean is increasingly acidic, thanks to ever more CO2 in the atmosphere. It's already affecting creatures as far away as Antarctica, and is decimating the wild oyster in the northwest U.S.

Learning this, and how natural carbonic acid in rain dissolves beached shells, I decided to do an experiment of my own. Just what does an acid really do to a shell, and how long does it take? Plus, with all the plastic waste swirling in the ocean, how might ocean acidification affect plastics?

So off to work I went. First, the ingredients:

Distilled white vinegar, 2 Atlantic surf clams, 1 blue mussel,
1 #4 plastic, 1 #5 plastic, 1 #6 plastic, and unk plastic bucket

As mentioned before, the pH scale measures acidity/alkalinity, 0 being most acid, 14 being most alkaline, 7 being neutral. Pure water should have a pH of 7. By mixing with CO2 in the air, rainwater tends to have a pH of about 5.6. What's the pH of distilled white vinegar? Anywhere from 2.0 - 3.4. The best way to tell? Test it yourself:

The litmus test

Seems suppliers might be a little bit cheap with the vinegar these days - the paper looks more like 4.0 than 3.4. Still, 3.4 is very mild -- about as acidic as an apple. (Lemon juice is 2.3, a can of Coke is 2.5.) Certainly nothing dangerous to a person. But what about a shellfish? Let's see. Here's the moment I first put all the ingredients into the bucket:

Instant reaction

Like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water, the shells immediately started reacting with the vinegar.

A quick word about seashells. As, say, a clam is growing, it develops a thin "skin" around its outside, called the periostracum. It's like a tiny membrane that wards off the outside world - including weak acids. But it's delicate, fragile, and usually worn away as the creatures lurch back and forth in tides, or burrow into the gritty sand on the seabed. In most cases, periostracum will not help a mature bivalve fend off an acid attack.

Back to the experiment. I poured enough vinegar into the bucket to cover the shells. Twice a day, I fished out the larger of the two surf clam shells and photographed it. Each morning I topped off the vinegar, and I replaced the vinegar twice through the length of the experiment. The pH of the solution ranged anywhere from ~3.4/4.0 to about 6.0 depending on how fresh the vinegar was. Here's what happened:

Start of experiment --
shell intact, periostracum worn in places

After 1 day -
periostracum darkened, bubbling

After 2 days

After 3 days

After 4 days

After 5 days

After 6 days

After 6 1/2 days

After 7 days

After 7 1/2 days

That's it. Gone. After just over a week, the Atlantic surf clam that had been half a foot long... is gone. In fact, all 3 of the shells I put in were gone. Leaving nothing behind but shreds of their empty skin. What do you think happened to all the various plastics? Long-time followers of the Flotsam Diaries will hardly be surprised by the answer:

Of course the oceans aren't predicted to drop to a pH of 3.4. Or even 6.0. They don't have to. The tiniest drop, from 8.1 to 7.8, causes a cascade of crises - some shellfish devote so much time to building & repairing their shells that they don't have the energy to devote to muscles, movement, immune systems, or procreation. A drop of just .2 killed half the copepods in a test group in a week. One chilling experiment showed that a drop of .4 killed 99.9% of a species of brittlestar larvae in 8 days.*

This isn't a small problem, or a made-up issue. This is reality, happening now. These are foods not only eaten by people, but are also the base foods for many of the other major foods we eat.

But who knows. Creatures have adapted before -- though it took them millennia, not decades. Perhaps they'll be able to get their energy from the plastics swirling in the water. Because, as we all know, plastic is forever.

Day 7 1/2 - The end

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* See this Scientific American article of August 2010 for these and many other examples.

Ashes to Ashes, Part II

A month ago, I wrote about a little test I'd been doing with cigarette butts. Do they really take ages to break down in waterways?

As a quick recap, on August 28 I took one of the thousands of cigarettes I've picked up from the beach and plopped it into a 5-gallon bucket of freshwater.

Day 1 - August 28, 2010

This simulates a cigarette butt falling from a gutter into a local storm drain.

From the storm drain, a cigarette butt will travel through a network of pipes until it dumps into a stream or river. And except in a few cities, there is nothing -- nothing -- to stop that cigarette (or any gutter trash) from going straight into the great waterways of the world.

So for the first month, I simulated the cigarette floating through storm drains. I put sand and a rock in the bucket to simulate the scouring effect of pipes & debris. Every day I took a stick and swirled it in the water 25 times to agitate it. By day 35 the paper was worn but the cigarette filter itself was still completely intact.

Day 35

Which is where my 1st post left off.

On now to the 2nd phase of the test. I switched gears and simulated the cigarette butt emptying out into a river. I doubled the daily agitation to 50 swirls. And I added a second piece of trash for comparison.

Day 37

Let's see what happens.

Day 40 - paper receipt settled to bottom

Day 47 - receipt already disintegrating

Day 51 - filter paper finally unraveling

Day 61

And finally, to today.

Day 69

And for fun, here's a closeup, taken this morning during the 30 seconds it's been out of the water since August 28.

Day 69-b

The filter paper is gone. The receipt has turned into an unrecognizable pulpy mass. But the cigarette butt lives on. Because it's plastic: a polyester called cellulose acetate.

Again, 5.5 trillion cigarettes are smoked each year. If even a miraculous 90% of them were disposed of properly, that leaves 550 billion littered each year. 550,000,000,000. That is 17,440 cigarette butts littered every second. Every second.

Here's another way of looking at it. Say a cigarette butt is an inch long. In only 20 days' time enough would be littered to reach the moon and back. And that's if only 10% of all cigarettes are littered. Do you think only 10% of all cigarettes are littered?

So my experiment goes on. Now at a little over 2 months, I'm going to switch to saltwater to simulate it reaching the ocean. And again, we'll see what happens.

Ashes to Ashes?

In early July I sat down to write a post about cigarettes and filter waste. What I had discovered... well, it woke me up. The scale of the pollution, the number of toxins, the proof that cigarettes kill marine life. I decided that I needed to learn more.

This summer I learned:

• That cigarette butts litter my lovely beach (and every public space I walk through).
• That the big "Tobacco-Free Area" sign on the lifeguard station did nothing to slow the weekly deluge.
• That a small, quiet beach in southern Maine can collect almost 2,000 filters in the course of the summer.
• And that filters really do wash up onto the beach from the ocean. I've seen it.

It's the last point that gets me. All those butts you see in the gutter, they go into the storm drains. Then to a nearby river or stream. Then to the ocean.

Think I'm wrong, and that they break down? Let's try a little experiment. Let's fill a 5-gallon bucket with water (fresh water, representing your local storm drain/river). Let's put some sand, wood, and a rock in it to simulate nature. Then let's drop a freshly-found cigarette butt into it. Every day or so let's swirl the cigarette around 25 times to simulate the churning it goes through in the "wild."

Day 1 - August 28, 2010

Give it a couple days.

Day 3

Give it another day, and something unexpected happens.

Day 4

Look at that! After 3 days it mysteriously sinks. But it's easily picked up by even gentle swirls of water. Like, say, a stream slowly meandering down to the ocean. Let's keep rolling.

Day 9

Still intact.

Day 14

Still intact.

Day 24

Still intact. And then finally to the latest picture from a day ago:

Day 35... and counting

So, it's more than a month in now. The paper's a little scraped. But the filter is still completely intact and unchanged. It does sink in a foot of fresh water, but it also moves very easily when any current is applied. After my experiment reaches two months, I'll switch to a bucket of saltwater to represent it emptying into the ocean. I'll swirl it more frequently to represent tides and waves. And we'll just keep going. How long do you think it'll be before it breaks down?

Here's another fun one. What happens if you subject a cigarette butt to a washing machine on normal cycle and then a dryer for an hour on medium heat? Not much.

Looks like.... a cigarette butt

5.5 trillion cigarettes are manufactured every year. Best studies suggest that only 10% make it properly into an ashtray or receptacle. But let's be generous. Let's say 90% make it. That still leaves 550 billion -- 550,000,000,000 -- littered. Every year. And they don't go away. They don't go away. Because they're plastic -- cellulose acetate. They will last for years. And even when they do finally dissolve to a powder that you can't see, they're still plastic. 

The tobacco industry is in no hurry to tell consumers that filters are plastic. Why? They found that smokers tend to ritualize the act of stubbing out a butt at the end of their cigarette (see p. 6 of the PDF file in the link). Most smokers simply don't think their actions are so far-reaching. What would it do to the industry's bottom line if smokers knew that most or all of the butts they've ever discarded onto the ground still exist?

Soda Can Experiment Update - July 7, 2010

So you may recall that I've found lots of corroded and rotted aluminum cans at the beach. And that I started an experiment to see if I could recreate the conditions that cause a can to rot. My last update was more than 3 weeks ago, so I wanted to drop another quick post.

A really quick post. What's changed in 3 weeks?

Not a lot.

New corrosion may be happening, but it's going so slowly that there's nothing really to show.

My hunch is that the exposed metal has oxidized, leaving very little surface area of fresh aluminum to react with the salt and corrode.

Thus, another rethink (or perhaps "threethink" at this point). I was so busy narrowing things down that I think I lost sight of the forest. The beach isn't one event, it's a system. It's sand, wind, salty air, wet times when the tide comes in, starkly dry times when it goes out. People kicking things around, burying them. It's dynamic, unpredictable. It's not a can sitting in a bucket of water on a countertop for a month.

So, my rethink: Make a soda can experience real beach conditions. A can should be drunk, crushed, shaken around in wet sand, shaken around in dry sand, tumbled, rolled, exposed to bright light, buried. Only by doing that will I be able to say whether it was a beach environment that causes a can to rot like those that I've collected.

More to follow!

Soda Can Experiment Update - June 14, 2010

So the experiment to see how aluminum cans rot at the beach continues. And this time, things are getting interesting.

Test cans soaking in seawater, 6/14/2010

In my last report (June 1: "Day 8-5"), I had added a third can, so I had three cans, all soaking in about 2 1/2 qts of seawater, left mostly undisturbed:

(1) A control can
(2) A can sitting with iron nails to test galvanic corrosion
(3) A sanded can in nails, to test if sand abrasion helps

Then about 6/3 a thought occurred. A can at the beach may accumulate more salt over time, as waves splash over it, and the water evaporates leaving salt behind. If I was trying to recreate conditions at the beach, perhaps I should steadily increase the salt levels. So I decided to remove the plastic coverings from the 3 containers and let the water evaporate naturally. This would increase the salt concentration more & more.

On 6/7 I added about another quart of seawater to each container to top them off.

And by 6/10, something neat started happening:

Around the cans' lips, little hard white deposits were starting to form. This was happening with all 3 cans, but most noticeably on can #3, the one I had pre-sanded.

This process is continuing, and seems to be accelerating. Just now I pulled out can #3 to get a better look:

I scratched off two of the deposits along the lip (leaving several others undisturbed) to see what was happening to the metal beneath. And sure enough, there seem to be some shallow divots in the aluminum itself. Also, the exposed aluminum on all 3 cans is starting to discolor & darken. Not corrode, but definitely oxidize. I don't know if this is salt action, or if there's just more oxygen in the water now that the covers are completely off.

Anyway, a pretty cool turn of events. The whole "needs iron nearby" thing seems more like a red herring. Meanwhile, the common-sense ideas of (1) sand abrading the cans to expose the metal and (2) heavier salt concentrations attacking the metal are both looking stronger.

I think I'm going to let this one ride now for another week without poking & prodding, and will post another update then. Oh, and if you were wondering, yes, this is fun! I highly recommend testing stuff.

Soda Can Experiment Update - The Plot Thickens

So it's been a week since I started my aluminum-can-in-seawater test. An update seems in order.

(Tues. June 1, 2010, 8:00PM)

I know, I know. I started with two cans and suddenly there are three! Explanation following. First, the originals: The left container is just seawater (refreshed once) and ginger ale can. There is no noticeable change to the water or the can. The middle is seawater (also refreshed once), ginger ale can, and iron nails -- working on the evidence that seawater helps iron to erode aluminum. This can too seems unchanged.

Back on 5/28 I thought about this, and did some more research. It turns out that aluminum cans are coated inside and out at the factory -- there's no aluminum actually exposed to the elements. So to truly test why the cans at the beach are so rotten and eroded, I had to think how nature could expose the aluminum.

Didn't actually have to think hard. Presumably, a beach is sandpaper at its most pure. Add some scouring action from wind & waves, and it's a fair guess that a soda can will have its outer coating scraped away naturally (though again, exactly how long is unknown). So I helped the process along with a third can, using a bit of fine (180 grit) sandpaper to expose some (but not all) of the actual aluminum.

Then I dunked this can in seawater with iron nails as a second test subject. It's now been sitting for 4 days straight (the far right can in the first picture above). So far, it's unclear if there's any change in it. It feels like it -might- be thinner & weaker when I touch it, but that may just be from the sanding. So the fun continues!

My prediction is that Can #1 (no iron) and Can #2 (iron & unsanded) will not change much even given weeks or months. Can #3 (iron & sanded) is what will make or break this test.

(Dating note: As of today, 6/1, the first two subjects are on Day 8 (having finished 7 days), and the third subject is on Day 5 (having finished 4 days). My notation for that is "Day 8-5," which is a system I'll keep until the experiment ends.)

Experimental archaeology

Instead of just thinking about how people used to make tools, build walls, create things, archaeologists are now actually doing it themselves. By experimenting, hands-on, they've overturned many venerated theories, and opened up new ones. It's an exciting field that has cast new light on everything from how Bronze Age Britons built Stonehenge to why Civil War weaponry & tactics were so deadly.

It's also useful for understanding how & why artefacts decay -- how they meet their end. I'm excited now to be tossing my hat in the ring.

I had asked a question about aluminum cans rotting at the beach.

I wanted to learn just what makes a soda can break down like the ones I had collected, and how long it really takes. It turns out, there are actually some really interesting experiments with how to corrode aluminum cans. But nothing that I found showed the natural effects of beach and ocean and salt.

So I decided to do an experiment of my own. From what I had learned, it seemed a can doesn't rot just because of seawater -- it also needs iron nearby to help it corrode. This seemed a good place to start my test. I would run a controlled experiment -- I'd put two cans in two buckets of seawater. One bucket would have iron nails in it, the other wouldn't.

This morning I grabbed an empty 5-gallon bucket from our condo's basement, went to Ocean Park, and filled it up in the ocean. I stopped at Hannaford's and picked up a 12-pack of ginger ale, then headed home. Cut the tops off of two milk jugs, emptied two of the cans (but left them unwashed to better simulate a can tossed out at the beach), and grabbed a handful of nails from the toolbox.

At 9:15AM, 5/25/2010, I filled each milk jug up with 2 1/2 quarts of the seawater, dumped the nails into one of the jugs, and put one can in each jug.

Lastly, I put a little clingwrap lightly over each jug to slow evaporation but still allow oxygen from the air to get in, and set the jugs off in a corner.

The next step is simple -- just wait and see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe an answer. Stay tuned!