Buck: Passed

I was just surfing various ecology Web sites. And I came across a link for beach cleanups in South Africa. So I clicked. (Why not?) Here's the home page I saw:

Found at: http://www.cleanup-sa.co.za/home.htm

"Plastics don't litter - people do!" This is the marine debris prevention partnership that international plastics industries wish to create. Our products are not the problem, you are.

Let's look at that handy plastic life-cycle chart again:

Which steps involve you, the consumer?

There are at least a dozen transition steps from plastic formulation to ultimate burial/incineration. You, the consumer, are responsible for one, maybe two, of those steps. Yet the plastics industry wants to put the burden, blame, and responsibility of it all on you.

So, let's see what you've done.

• Did you identify, clean, sort, & put out your recyclable plastics? Did the bin get blown over, scavenged, hit by a plow, poorly emptied by a recycling truck that's doing its best? Your fault.

• Did you take your family to the park? Did your snack packages have tear-off tops? (Most likely.) Did a torn-off top blow out of your hand, or baggie, despite your good intentions? Your fault.

• Did you try to reduce plastic use but realized that even green companies like Tom's of Maine has switched to a plastic toothpaste tube that will persist for centuries if lost? Your fault.

• Did you try to point out that single-use plastic bags put an undue burden on our world? You may find yourself sued (Hilex Poly and others currently suing ChicoBag). And when that bag you tried not to use gets blown out of the recycling bin you put it into, it's your fault.

• Have you ever been victim of a flood, a hurricane, worse? All that plastic material in your car, your office, your home -- it washed into the environment, and will stay there. By the millions of tons around the globe. Your fault.

• Do you live in a developing nation like Indonesia? Coca-Cola ramped up capacity to deliver single-use plastic bottles to Indonesians by 30% just this past year. Never mind the country's waste management infrastructure can't handle with what it already has. Coke was top-tier sponsor of the 5th International Marine Debris Conference. Tons of waste, no means to manage it, your fault.

The theme is clear. The plastics industry would like to shed as much responsibility and burden for the mess its products create as it can. And so far, they've done a good job of it.

But they do get one thing right: you can take responsibility. You can make a difference. As a very wise 17-year-old high schooler standing amid the plastic waste of Midway Atoll wrote last week: "There is always a choice."

Re-Education, Part 1

Context. Another archaeology term. It means that an artefact's true value comes from understanding how, when, and why it ended up where it did. The same is true of flotsam. Finding a piece of trash is great. But only by knowing the how, when, and why will it tell you its whole story.

My initial plan was simple: pick an area of a beach I love, walk up and down the high-tide mark for a couple blocks, collect whatever trash I notice, catalog it, report it. And then -- most important -- learn something from it.

I posted my March 8 & March 19 finds to this blog a month ago. To any who think I then quit, oh no. Below are results of my April 3 haul:

My half-hour two-block stroll on April 3 netted me: Several pounds of commercial fishing rope, an unidentified burlap scrap, 8 scraps of aluminum can, 24 lobster claw bands, a plastic cup, two cup lids, a plastic knife, two plastic forks, various scraps of cups & plates, a popped balloon enmeshed in kelp, a decayed rubber baseball, a shotgun shell, two beach umbrella bases, some newspaper, a 10-inch-tall oil filter, part of a "No Trespassing" sign, and a few bits of unidentified molded plastic.

I have more plastic bags of trash down in the shed waiting to be cataloged, from 4/14, 4/20, 5/11, 5/18, 6/2.

One problem: My initial plan? It kind of sucked. The story lacks context. Turns out, I didn't have very good controls at all. Instead, my plan let in too many holes -- too many variables -- to actually say much.*

Hole #1: Randomness -- Picking casually, instead of fully clearing an area, hamstrings me. Did that oil filter arrive between 3/19 and 4/3? Or was it there long before? No idea. Did it wash in by normal waves? By a storm? Get tossed intentionally? No clue.

Hole #2: Outside influence, small-scale -- There may be others collecting trash. And for sure there are others collecting kelp (with its debris) to use as compost. So even if I collected everything I found, does that mean I've collected everything that was there? No idea.

Hole #3: Outside influence, large-scale -- Tractors now hit the beach frequently, and they're drastically churning & changing the landscape. As of 6/8, most (not all) of the lobster traps have been hauled off. If I had started my hunt this week, there would be much less meeting my eye than there was in March. What else have they been hauling away or burying? No clue.

In the end, my first method was hopelessly lacking in controls. It left me unsure of when debris arrived, how it arrived, and how much of it arrived. It's time for a new approach, and I think I've found it. Stay tuned.

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* Lest this seem all doom & gloom, the past couple of months have opened my eyes in -amazing- new ways. And the trash itself has at least spawned good questions, if not always good answers. The aluminum can scraps, for example. By studying them, I'm learning that the insides are mostly intact. They've been eaten away from the outside. Something besides seawater (which obviously sloshes around inside -and- outside a can) may be the culprit that's rotting these cans down. More to follow.