A Tale of Two Winters

From Dec 2010 - Feb 2011, I collected, on average 180 pieces of manmade debris at my beach, Bayview, in Saco, Maine each week.

From Dec 2011 - Feb 2012, that number was an average of 60 pieces each week!

Anyone following my Collection Reports has seen that the amount of debris I'm pulling off the beach has nosedived. It would be very tempting to see this as amazing news. I'd be tempted too, if not for all the research I'm now conducting simultaneously on a second beach further south.*

This, plus 153 individual scraps of fishing rope, came from my
second beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, for a total of 249
pieces of junk from 150 ft of shoreline. In one week in Feb.

No, the debris is still swirling in the Gulf of Maine, as fiercely as ever. But for some reason, starting in mid-November, it largely stopped washing up on Bayview beach.

Why?

There are two really intriguing possibilities. The first has to do with a strange phenomenon called internal waves. The ocean isn't one big homogenous lump of water. It is stratified -- often sharply -- with fresh, "light" layers on top and saltier, "dense" layers down below. When the stratification is strong, energy that gets put into the ocean (from storm or surface wind, etc.) can propagate along the boundaries between those layers. It's the cause of what's known as "dead water" -- when, say, a boat propellor that usually pushes the boat forward instead sends all its energy just into creating these underwater waves, and the boat hardly moves at all.

What does this have to do with beach debris? Well if the winter of 2010/11 was a time of high stratification between layers, more ocean energy may have traveled through these undersea conduits, churning up the seabottom and its debris. This huge wrackline from December 2010...

...may have gotten its beginnings from a churned-up seafloor thanks to shallow-water internal waves. Contrast that view with this winter's:

All winter long there has been almost zero seaborne wrack. No wrack = no plastic. Are the internal waves weaker this year, or even shut down? It's been an exceptionally mild winter in Maine. Freakishly mild. Does Saco Bay need bone-chilling air masses to stratify its waters in winter? We've also had fairly little rain or snow all winter long. Does the bay need fresh river runoff to stratify it?

I don't know. But it's one thought, and it's got some support from oceanographers I've spoken with.

The second thought comes from the few curious finds that have surfaced. Twice in the past month, I've pulled from the sands pulltab-era aluminum tops from old rusted-away steel cans.

2/29: Generic style used ~1970-1980

3/12: Coke can used only '71-'72

A third 30+ year-old pulltab aluminum top down in Curtis Cove makes 3 in a month! Which makes me wonder if an offshore sandbar has shifted, revealing 30-year-old flotsam and dampening the energy coming into Bayview. Just this week, at an ultralow low-tide, I snapped this muddy bar which peeked out of the water at the very edge of the tide line:

I've never seen anything like a sandbar exposed out at Bayview before. The ripples show that it's migrating landward. If it has bigger cousins just offshore, and they're steep enough to cut off inflow of seafloor debris, that may be what's stopping the debris from coming in.

As usual, I have more questions than answers. Clearly there's some energy at the beach. I've documented huge sandloads dumped up on the shore this winter, as well as several lobster traps. Yet the stuff that would get whipped up, suspended, and dragged in -- like vinyl, polystyrene, seaweed -- it's just not coming.

Whatever's keeping it from coming in, it's out there. And it will start washing into Bayview again. It's just a question of when. For the moment, it leaves me with the tantalizing question of "Why?"

---

* More specifics on this beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, in a future post, soon!

A Toy Story

Behold, the mighty Lego:

On July 20, during my weekly collection at Bay View, I picked up this little guy and plopped him into the bag. No biggie, just a toy at the beach.

It was only a few days later, when sorting through the bag, that it struck me: Who brings Legos to the beach? They're way too easy to lose. They don't lock together right when sand gets in them. They're just not a beach toy.

It so happened that I was reading a neat little book on marine debris at the same time:

(Burns, Loree Griffin. Tracking Trash. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.)

It tells the story of oceanographer & beachcomber Curtis Ebbesmeyer. In 1990, he heard of Nike sneakers washing up in Washington state. Turns out a cargo ship had hit a storm in the Pacific. Five shipping containers of the sneakers went overboard. Dr. Ebbesmeyer contacted beachcombers up and down the West Coast to find out when and where the shoes were washing up. Then he and his friend, oceanographer Jim Ingraham, started plugging the data into computer models to learn how currents move.

Their work has brought the science of ocean and wind currents leaps beyond where it once was. And 20 years later, they're still at it. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham are tracking the flotsam of a dozen major container spills. One happened on February 13, 1997, 20 miles west of Land's End, Cornwall, England. The Tokio Express, en route from Rotterdam to New York, was struck by a rogue wave and lost 62 containers.

One of those containers held 4,756,940 brand new Legos.

Fast-forward to Bay View, July 20, 2010. The Lego I picked up came from high-tide line, as though washed in. It's an unlikely thing to bring to the beach. Did this little toy travel the North Atlantic for 13 years and several thousand miles? I don't know. In a bucket of still water it sinks; I have no idea what it would do in dynamic ocean water.

What I do know is that it was never used.

Under a 30x - 21mm jeweler's loupe it is pristine. Not one scratch, no wear, no sign that it was ever connected to another Lego, top or bottom, ever dragged through the sand. This Lego was lost before it ever touched a child's hand, and was found before it was ever worn down by beach & wave.

I've sent an e-mail in to Dr. Ebbesmeyer. He has the full cargo manifest, and will know if the style of piece I found was onboard. Being so generic, I'll probably never know exactly where it came from. But if it dropped locally, I'll eat my hat.

It's a big world, and a big ocean... until it isn't.

The Bountiful Shore: Collection Report June 22-2010

Tuesday, 6/22, 7:30AM saw me in the car on the way to Bay View. It had been 6-7 days since my first collection. I didn't know what to expect. I had scoured my two zones well the week before. But it had been hot & sunny (by Maine standards) -- and also early days of school vacation. What would an under-the-radar local beach offer?

A first glance on the N zone suggested an active week:

Signs of life at the party log

Caffeinated chain-smoking

I dug in. And I have to say, whatever I expected from zone N, this wasn't it.

205 finds!

• Building materials: 1 (piece of wooden lathe/fence rail)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 9
• Food-related plastics: 38 (inc. Hershey's, Rice Krispies Treats, AirHeads, various gum wrappers, 3 straws/stirrers, Listerine Cool Mint single-pack, "Great Value" granola bar)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 14 (inc. 2 bubble blowers, bandaid, plastic pail sticker, Trojan packet)
• Cigarette filters: 93
• Cigarette package debris: 5
• Paper, identifiable: 7 (New England coffeecup, Hallmark store bag, Star magazine insert, salt packet, label for a folding chair, "Jack's Jokes" bubblegum joke card, scrap with food ingredients)
• Paper, unidentifiable: 5
• Glass bottle/can: 7 (2 beer bottles, beer can, can scrap, 3 bottlecaps)
• Misc: 26 (gum, 2 pieces twine, plant pot, 3 socks, wooden kite rod, 2 pieces sea glass, 16 pieces of fireworks)

A few of the highlights:

Food plastics

Non-food ID'able plastics

Unknown plastics






All of this... in six days. A few were clustered -- the party trash around the log (beer, cigs, candy, and fireworks), the chainsmoking coffee-drinker. The rest were mostly random. Most of it was fresh. (Maybe 20 things had signs of age on them -- cig butts, the can scrap, most of the foam bits, a few candy wrappers. Either I missed them on 6/16, or winds and feet shifted the sands and revealed them.) Most of it was plausibly beach-related. The one thing that struck me: nothing fishing-related. No piece of line, no claw band, nada. First time ever since starting my beach jaunts.

Of the 205 items, a lucky wind would have easily blown at least 180 of them right into the ocean. What gets me is, maybe a lucky wind did just that with another 180 some time between 6/16 and 6/22. If so, who knows where and when they'll return to land? But one way or another, they probably will.

Compared to the N zone, the S zone was a different world.

Only 32 finds here.

• Building materials: 1
• Foam/Styrofoam: 7
• Fishing rope: 2
• Fish misc/claw bands: 1 (claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (inc. another "Great Value" granola bar wrapper)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 5 (beach umbrella base, Secret deodorant scrap, tissue box lid seal)
• Cigarette filters: 10
• Misc.: (2 sea glass, winter slipper)

Wow. This gave some cred to my initial hypothesis -- that beachgoers will stick to the N zone due to the "Private Beach" signs separating "N" from "S". Also, what was there was less identifiably "beach" stuff. The cigarette butts & granola wrapper, sure. But the abraded deodorant scrap, a plastic shred that maybe was a bottle cap LONG ago, the shreds of foam -- and especially the winter slipper (which I promise I didn't miss on 6/15!) -- those seem to tell a different story. One of washed up or blown in debris -- one that gets to the heart of what I'm trying to find out. Take the slipper.

As found on the beach

What happened here? Washed up last week? Buried by sand until last week? Not sure. But a quick peek at the bottom reveals...

...it's made of the kind of stuff that could survive months -- or years -- at sea.

Thus ends Week #2 at Bay View. A productive -- if maybe depressing -- window into how we treat our public spaces. Zone N was mostly littered by local, recent, beach-related trash. Zone S was more likely to be older trash, seemingly brought from elsewhere.

What will the next trip bring? Who knows.

Baseline: Collection Report June 15/16-2010

Discovering Bay View brought a lot to the table: nearby beach; distinct high-traffic and quiet zones; no industrial disturbances. A real find and a great location for a budding beachcomber.

But location is only half the game. Clueing in about how & why debris ends up on a beach means knowing just what's there from week to week. (An obvious concept that still took me a couple months to learn.) So I resolved to pick up every last scrap of trash that I could find, each trip. A burden? For me, the scent of saltwater carried on the crisp morning air, and the rhythmic crashing of the ocean in my ears, is anything but.

So, last week I created my baseline. On 6/15 I scoured the quiet, "S" section of Bay View beach, picking up every piece of manmade debris I could find on the surface. Results:

53 finds:

• Building materials: 6
• Foam/Styrofoam: 14
• Fishing rope: 3
• Fishing misc.: 2 (inc. 1 claw band, lobster trap tag not associated with any trap found yet)
• Food-related plastics: 5
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 11
• Cigarette filters: 9
• Unique: 3 (cardboard package; Y-shaped plastic... thing; "Sea Bass" fish fillet knife sheath)

No clue whether the plastic thingy is a toy, or a disposable tear-off cap to a bottle, or what. Thoughts?

The knife sheath was neat, given all the clamming and shoreline fishing that I've witnessed -- and given its age & wear. Otherwise, there was little that stuck out, except maybe the bits of broken red balloon. How many are released every year, to explode high in the sky and cascade to the ground who-knows-where?

 The next morning, 6/16, I hit the "N" section:

A true mother lode! 271 finds in all:

• Building materials: 14
• Foam/Styrofoam: 17
• Fishing rope: 20
• Fish misc/claw bands: 14 (inc. 8 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 33 (inc. 7 straws/stirrers, 2 forks, PB cracker wrapper, 5 bottle caps, 2 ringpops)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 44 (inc. Bubblemaker cap, Trojan wrapper, adult & kid bandids, ChapStick)
• Cigarette filters: 95 (!)
• Paper, identifiable: 10 (inc. dryclean tag, Whole Foods napkin, Hannaford coupon, Walmart receipt 5/26/10) 
• Paper, unidentifiable: 17 (inc. 5 pieces of bonfire cardboard)
• Misc./unique: 7 (flipflop, soda can, 2 can scraps, 2 wads of gum, pillowcase scrap)

And there we go. Two sections of a southern Maine beach, picked as clean as possible. Some eye-openers among the bags too. 104 cigarette filters total, that blew me away. The Walmart receipt was interesting -- it shows that even fragile paper withstands exposure to sun & storm for weeks at least. But what really gets me is the breadth of finds. It's not just the expected "beach" stuff. It's a full slice of life -- commerce, industry, retail, sex, household, food, bad habits, even a late-night bonfire or two. This little stretch of little-traveled shore is a snapshot of American life.

At any rate, now the fun can really begin. I left my "N" and "S" sections as trash-free as I could. I've got my baseline. This week I'll be going back. And I'm actually excited to see what's arrived in the interim.

How weird is that?

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

What lies beneath

Memorial Day has come and gone, and the unofficial start of Maine summer is here. At local beaches, that means one thing:

Industrial Cleanup (June 2, 2010)

At Ocean Park, summer tourism = beach tourism. And beach tourists expect clean sand. So for the past week the tractors have been hard at work, trawling, smoothing, respreading. And clearing away the huge mounds of kelp along with their tangled flotsam.

Former site of kelp field

Looks pretty good. But again... dig a little deeper. I stuck my toe in the sand, and found kelp. I dug down with my hands, more kelp. I spent about 2 minutes casually hand-sifting and digging through a few square feet. And in just that time, I found, amid the decaying organic matter:

Plastic debris found amid buried kelp

The tractoring, and the trawling -- it wasn't actually ridding the beach of all its junk. Much was just being churned up, covered over, made to look good. No doubt the intent is to let nature run her course with the organics and eventually leave clean sand through & through. But nature can't run her course with everything. There are things churned into the sand that do not go away.

Still, this does give me a little more insight into some of what I've been finding at the beach. Yes, clearly much is washing in from the ocean. But perhaps other bits too were lost right here one summer past, and then churned under the sands for years until re-emerging? It really does make you wonder just how much is lying in wait. And how much more is added every year. Especially when the technology tasked with removing it isn't able to do so.

Debris left on ground in wake of tractors

Introductions

In April 2007, my wife gave birth to a beautiful, perfect baby girl.

We were in our mid-30s. Happy, unattached, travelers. We enjoyed life, we looked forward to our future. Down inside, I think we had come to expect that when we ended, the future ended. For all we cared or knew.

Then our daughter arrived, and I knew what fathers have known for ... ever. The future would go on. Our girl would inherit it. Her eyes would see things that mine never would; yet her heirs, and theirs, would be part of a story that I had read, and shaped, and written. It was the dawning of a father's knowledge, that he has to change the world for his little girl.

Fast-forward to March 2010. The first warm day at the tail end of a Maine winter, and a quick family trip to the beach. Ocean Park, one of the most lovely sandy shores in Maine. Yet the end of February had seen violent storms, and they had left their mark. Clam shells and great heaps of kelp lined the highwater mark.

And with it, the detritus of mankind -- rope, a glove, a broken plastic spoon, fishing line, a torn beer can, its sharp edges poking up through the soft sand. And lobster traps, ripped from the deeps and dragged for miles, to be half-buried on the beach.

 

I'd seen the news about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The plastics that don't break down, that swirl in giant eddys & gyres in distant waters. The litter and debris that travels for thousands of miles, fouling pristine waters, washing up on pristine beaches. But this wasn't the Pacific. This was my beach, ten minutes from home. The more I looked, the more I saw. Part of a red plastic cup, more nylon rope, bright rubber bands. It was everywhere.

The next day, I came back to the beach, trash bag in hand. And I picked. Two blocks, a leisurely half-hour stroll, and the bag was full.

March 8, 2010 finds

I had barely scratched the surface. Yet I was carrying several pounds of rope, dozens of jagged pieces of aluminum can, shotgun shells, shreds of lobster traps, most of a pair of sunglasses, several plastic forks, a dozen beach umbrella bottoms, rubber tubing, architectural fragments, and 132 brightly colored rubber bands.

I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I didn't know if there was anything I could do with it. But I knew I was at the beginning of something, and that this wasn't a bag just to be thrown in the dumpster and forgotten. Because this wasn't just my beach. This was my daughter's. And so I resolved to change the world. Somehow.