Collection Report - September 7, 2013

Saturday, September 7. 5:45PM. An hr before low tide. 70 degrees or so. A little rain over the previous week, but still nothing in the way of storms. Very much still a summer, calm weather pattern. And a shore that looked largely the same:

And a little bit different. For one thing, this day the beach reeked. The wraack on the low foreshore was starting to rip from its cobbles, die and rot. The runoff coming back down into the ocean had turned into a cloudy goo in places.

The mounds of cobbles & pebbles on the back of the low foreshore from August were still here. Along with some newly washed in bits & bobs. The back of the low foreshore up to the end of the algae was very flat. Then there was a noticeable lip as beach angled upward. Going up, the accumulation fell away quickly.

Thanks to the gentle summer waves, lots of vinyl ended again up at the southern end of my zone. Crazy lots:

Higher up on the bone-dry backshore,  offshore breezes blew the soft sand back off of the last bits of uncollected winter rope. That gave me a rope count for this week, even though no new rope came in. All told, another very busy day.

32 pcs of rope, about 20 ft total

744 pcs of nonrope debris

776 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 3
• Fishing rope/net: 32
• Fishing misc.: 662 (617 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 3 bumpers, 5 parts, bait bag, entrance ring, fishing line, 34 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 25 (2 bottle scraps, 2 bottlecap o-rings, 17 cup scraps, 2 bread tags, fork, plate scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 15 (2 bag scraps, cigarette, floss, bandaid, toy house roof pc, packaging, 2 cable ties, crate seal, 2 tubings, anchor, end cap, contact lens solution label scrap)
• Scrap plastics: 36 ( 14 > 1" , 22 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (fabric piece, 2 sea glass)

It was a varied week. Lots of odd things across the spectrum. But really, there's still one story here:

Fix it, or drown in it. There are no other choices.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 7840
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1812
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4435

Sown. Reaped.

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.

Ex Uno, Plures

When I stroll the sands at Bay View, I pick up bits of trash one at a time. When I'm home in the evening, cleaning & sorting & counting my finds, I tally them one at a time. And then I create my collection reports and my list, touting all the individual pieces of garbage I've found.

But all flotsam is not alike. Compare this...

1 piece of flotsam

...to this:

1 piece of flotsam

Of course that tiny piece of plastic didn't start off so tiny. Whatever it was, it was once much bigger. Maybe as big as the balloon above. And if I had found it intact, on the beach, I would have registered it as "1 piece of flotsam." The question is: How many pieces has it broken down into? Where did they go? The answer is: Who knows?

An analogy. Here's your basic styrofoam packing peanut.

1 piece of simulated flotsam

Here's what it looks like after being rolled around in my hand for a few seconds, to simulate being ground up by the surf.

Far more than 1 piece of simulated flotsam

Suddenly, it's gone from one piece of garbage to hundreds of little floatable flecks, like these I found at the beach one week. Ex uno, plures.

Here's another analogy. This is a lobster trap.

img "Catching lobster.jpg"
from Wikimedia Commons

These are bits of vinyl trap coatings washed ashore last week:

Lots of bits

Traps get scraped & dinged, the steel exposed. Many traps (maybe hundreds of thousands) are lost at sea. The exposed steel rusts slowly on the sea floor. Rust expands, bursting the vinyl coatings. In time, the steel will all rust away to dust. But the vinyl bits will live on. One lobster trap can generate thousands of them as it slowly disintegrates under the waves. Ex uno, plures.

So what? What's the point of this ramble? It's to make a distiction that's often missed, between big flotsam that disturbs our eyes, and tiny flotsam that disturbs entire ecosystems. And to connect the former to the latter.

An intact trap, or balloon -- we can see that, it's obvious. We can clean it up. 1 piece of flotsam.

The small stuff is far more insidious. Tiny flecks elude us. They get into the guts of small-bodied (read: small-brained) fish & filter feeders. Bigger creatures eat them -- and their plastic-laden friends. Now the bigger creatures have a bigger dose of plastic chemicals in them. And on and on, polluting every stage of the food web, eventually ending up on our plates. (Similar to how mercury from coal-burning now poisons so much of the tuna in our oceans.)

All large pieces of plastic are trying to break up into countless small pieces of plastic. Given time, they'll succeed. Every balloon, bottle, measuring cup, shovel, glove, recycling bin, buoy, chunk of foam, or broken boat hull (!) that ends up in the ocean... it isn't really just one piece of flotsam. It's 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 pieces of flotsam, just biding their time.

What were you?

Ex uno, plures. Out of one, many.

Deconstructing a Winter Storm

So the last several weeks have been weird at the beach. When the storms are their most violent, the flotsam is nonexistent. When the weeks are the calmest, litter runneth over. What gives?

Well, by chance, I found a big clue in another blog.

5 Gyres is a group of scientists & marine adventurers, with a twist. They raise awareness about ocean pollution by actually getting out in the oceans and documenting it. One gyre at a time, they're proving to a skeptical world that every last corner of our planet is infected by the plague of plastic waste. And that we have to do something about it.

In November they set sail from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, across the South Atlantic Gyre to Cape Town, South Africa. En route they set out scores of trawls to capture flotsam. Sadly, every single trawl brought in plastics - even in the middle of the ocean, 1500 miles from land.

from http://5gyres.org/posts/2010/12/04/
rising_from_the_deep_plastic

Sad, eye-opening, and a blog that's VERY worth reading from beginning to end. A pretty epic adventure.

But for my purposes, one part especially hit home. Early in their voyage they hit days of horrible weather - raging wind & seas. And guess what? All that energy in the ocean? It pushes things down in the water column. Their trawls still found plastic, but it was almost invisible on the water's surface.

So maybe when huge storms rise in the Gulf of Maine, all that energy does the same thing - pushes floating bits down toward the seafloor, where they have a hard time washing in to shore?

The other possibility is that they wash in to shore just fine, but are quickly buried by the same kind of brute force that can do this.

That's not supposed to happen

After all, I've pulled out plenty of three-foot-long fishing rope scraps that only had 2-3 inches exposed. And I've watched something as light as a dry old leaf stay put while Mother Nature's winds piled sand on top.

If it can happen to a leaf...

So what's happening at Bay View beach when a storm comes in? Probably, as always, a combination of both of the above -- along with a dozen other things. And as I've shown, my understanding of the whole shebang is... limited. But at least I'm in good company. The best minds in the world are only now starting to unlock the mysteries of how oceans work, and how important their health is to life as we know it.

It's great to be along for the ride.

Collection Report Sept 4, 2010

Following on from this post about the scene at Bay View beach, Saco, Maine the morning after former-hurricane Earl barely missed us.

I knew when I got home I had a big haul. Both from the flotsam washing up right in front of my eyes and the remnants of late-summer fiestas.

42 individual sparklers... not that I counted

Overall, it was an astounding catch. Here's Zone N:

411 finds:

• Building material: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12 (inc. two pieces of Dunkin Donuts coffee cup)
• Fishing misc.: 12 (4 claw bands, 5 pieces of rope, 2 trap tags, 1 trap tag scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 59 (inc. Ritz PB crackers, Quaker Chewy oatmeal bar, Sunbelt Choc Chip cookies, Twizzlers, Reese's PB cup, Snickers bar, organic vanilla yogurt, label from Granny Smith apple, label from Fuji apple)
• Food-related metal/glass: 12 (inc. 5 bottle caps: Mike's Hard Lemonade, Twisted Tea, Miller Lite, and 2 Blue Moon Brewing Co.)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 70 (inc. bits of plastic shopping bags, 4 bandaids, rabbit-shaped Silly Band, insole (?) labeled "RIVER", 4 rubber bands (maybe from sandwiches), beach umbrella base, "leaf" from toy or ornament, and 15 bashed-around scraps of hard plastic -- most likely washed in)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 168 (152 local, 10 likely floaters, 6 plastics)
• Paper/wood: 26 (inc. burned Spanish-language magazine bits found at bonfire, label from plastic water bottle, Budweiser label scrap, pharmacy receipt, Reny's "Paid" sticker, two salt packets, ice-cream cone wrapper)
• Misc./unique: 52 (inc. 42 sparklers, sock, towel tag, velcro scrap, 4 firework scraps, nylon seam reinforcement strip)

Just... wow. 411 finds shatters the Zone N record. It shatters the combined N/S record. 162 cigarettes shatters that record. The bashed-up, washed-in plastic scraps are sobering, the trap tags and claw bands ever-present after any storm. The food wrappers in their bright, happy colors...

Of all the bits & bobs, a few that caught my eye:

What "162 cigarette butts" looks like

Shards of mostly waterborne plastics

Two of the ~1 million tags lost annually

Nope, burning plastic still doesn't get rid of it

Which claw band's been in the water the longest?

Needs no caption

It just keeps coming.

By the time I'd finally finished picking up Zone N, there was again no time to check Zone S. And other commitments kept me away for the days afterward. So again, sadly no comparison between "busy" Zone N and "quiet" Zone S. But this coming weekend an old friend I haven't seen in a very long time will be visiting with me. And for some strange reason, he also thinks a nice way to spend a Saturday morning is picking up other folks' trash at the beach! So we just might have a Zone N-and-S post again soon.