Collection Report - September 23, 2013

Monday, September 23. 8:30AM. Right at low-tide. Bright sun. 55 degrees. Colors of the bushes along the backshore starting to change as fall begins to take hold. Still pink, purple, red, & white blooms on the beach roses.

This day I saw some erosion at back of foreshore. Heavier bits of seaweed had been tossed up & clumped there. And a small cliff had formed from waves pounding into back of foreshore and dragging back some of the softer sand.

The low-foreshore rocks had a pretty unsorted/jumbled look to them. August's cusps & mounds had been smeared and flattened out. There was lots of larger tossed-up wrack. And amidst that I found new pieces of rope, the first bits of newly washed-in rope that I'd seen in some months. That only seems to happen here when there's been true energy coming in. That same energy seems to have been what's scoured the sand back. Things changing as summer turns to autumn.

And as summer forage turned to autumn fruits, out have come the deer!

I tracked out four sets of deer prints on the beach! Pressed deeply & freshly into the soft sand at the backshore. Two large prints, two small prints. Sometime just overnight judging by how fresh the tracks were. I love this beach.

Someone else loves this beach. I found the carapace of a cooked lobster amid a rock ring. Looking at its shell, I see why it was cooked.

This lobster has the dreaded "shell disease" -- a parasite that damages lobster shells but leaves the meat untainted. It's still fit to eat, but nobody would want to buy a lobster that looked like that. The lobsterman who caught this possibly cooked it up for his family.

Shell disease decimated southern New England's lobster fishery starting in 1999. It's creeping northward. If it hits the Gulf of Maine with full force, the lobster industry is in real trouble.

Well, the higher energy this week would usually mean less debris left behind than in recent weeks. Did it?

50 pcs of rope, about 50 ft total

326 pcs of nonrope debris

376 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 50
• Fishing misc.: 253 (237 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 4 trap parts, bait bag, bumper, 10 clawbands)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (2 bottlecap seals, 18 cup scraps, 2 bread tags, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 14 (cigarette, bandaid, 6 cable ties, 2 cords, 4 anchors)
• Scrap plastics: 34 ( 11 > 1" , 23 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 0

Disturbingly, 243 pieces of lobster trap was indeed far less than what I'd been averaging for the previous month. 326 pieces of garbage coming off an untouristed beach. And that's a "good day."

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9320
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1862
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5667

Curtis Cove Report - Feb 26, 2013

February 26, 2013. 2:00PM, a couple hours before low tide. My last cleanup of Year 1 at Curtis Cove! Bright sun, 40 degrees. Rough sea, but little wind.

The big breakers out on the outcrops at the head of the cove = soggy & sloppy sand & mud & wrack smeared up and down the shore. A real mess of a beach!

But the first hopeful signs of spring behind the backshore. As I had a big group of witnesses to my efforts this day:

The scooped-out sand and wave-dragged wrack from the backshore spoke of the power of the past week's seas.

And of course stormy days bring lots of plastic "gifts." Including ones that have no business on a beach. A soda/water bottle I could understand. But a honey-bear jug??

Even better, this week brought the remains of a plasticized menu from a Kennebunkport restaurant. From 2007!

We place restaurants right next to Maine's windy coast, and populate them with plastic plates, cups, bottles, ketchup packets, sauce tubs, salt & pepper shakers, forks & knives -- and now even menus. And we wonder why our ocean looks like it does.

So, surprising no one, a very busy day.

236 pcs of rope, about 550 ft total

110 pcs of nonrope debris

346 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 236 (about 550 feet)
• Fishing misc.: 34 (19 bait bags, 3 vents, 2 trap tags, 8 vinyl coating scraps, bumper, clawband)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (3 bottlecap seals, 16 cup scraps, drink wrapper, ketchup pack, honeybear jug, 2007 menu!)
• Food-related glass/metal: 5 (2 whole/new cans, 3 can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 31 (11 bag scraps, 2 mylar balloon scraps, 2 latex balloons, 3 balloon strings, thread spool, tampon applicator, toy shovel handle, pressure-treatment tag from 1988, 5 cable ties, EXIT (?) sign scrap, 2 end caps, plunger scrap)
• Scrap plastics: 13 ( 9 > 1" , 4 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 4 (2 gloves, 2 fabric pieces)

Yet again, fishing debris far & away took the gold this week. Stormy weather & choppy seas tends to fling floatable plastics up and over the outcrops at the cove's head, which is what happened here with the vents, bait bags, and trap tags.

The waves also brought weirdness. The honeybear, the 2007 menu. And this 25-year-old tag from a piece of pressure-treated lumber. Looking brand new!

Tampon applicators were a scourage for me at Bay View beach in Saco. Not many here at Curtis Cove, thankfully. But the cove isn't immune:

And, as always, the poignant bits of seabottom plastics with fish/crustacean bites & pokemarks all through them:

A heck of a thing we do to our world.

Year One Total counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 13854
• Pcs fishing rope -- 4011 (~6600 feet)
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5245

A Call to Service

Today in the US it's Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Crowds are already gathering in Washington, DC to hear the President's 2nd inaugural speech. Many around the nation have the day off thanks to the holiday celebrating the late civil rights leader.

A Washington, DC Tweeter snapped and posted this image at a DC intersection:

And it just had me wondering...

Today we celebrate two huge things. First, the fundamental idea of democracy, freedom -- the idea that a people can and should have the liberty and rights and responsibility to rule itself.

Second, we celebrate the memory of a man who gave his life for the idea of justice for all people. His call to service helped lift our national discussion about who we are and what we can be.

We grow up being taught that freedom isn't free. That service to each other and to our nation is a noble goal. An essential goal.

And yet on this day, where those ideals are front and center, we can't even be bothered to crush our used single-use coffee cups so that they take up less room in the trash can. (Or in the recycling bin, where they actually don't belong in the first place.)

It seems to me, there is much work still to do if we're going to become what we say we want to be.

Plastic Recycling, China, and the Big Green Lie

The United States currently dumps more than 50% of its "recycled" plastic on China. China's record on environmental regulation of its plastic-recycling industry is, in a word, abysmal.

Chinese woman collecting plastic bottles from filthy river
Source:  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/136511/
A-woman-collecting-plastic-bottles-near-a-river-where-the 

After withering under a growing international spotlight, China has finally agreed to a series of regulations. The following list of newly banned practices comes directly from this September 5, 2012 "Plastics News" article:

• Recycling activities in residential areas;
• Using recycled plastic to make ultrathin bags (shopping bags less than 0.025mm thick and other bags less than 0.015mm in thickness) that have been banned since 2007;
• Using recycled plastic to make food-contact bags;
• Handling of hazardous waste (with chemical residues, pesticide or disposable medical packaging) without special operating license;
• Processing activities without sufficient water treatment facilities, such as granulation of woven bags, washing of plated scrap, stripping of plating or coating, etc.;
• Improper handling of waste from the recycling process;
• Outdoor incineration of plastic scrap and waste from the recycling process.
• Importing unwashed, post-consumer scrap;
• Transferring imported waste to a company other than what is allowed by the import license, including sending the materials to vendors for washing services;
• Selling unwashed leftover plastic materials after sorting and processing imported plastic scrap;
• Selling unwashed leftover plastic materials after sorting and processing imported scrap paper.

Let that sink in. That's all just now being made illegal. Half of all the bottles and jugs that we have dutifully cleaned, sorted, and put into a curbside bin have been shipped to a country that had zero functional oversight on all of the above. All this time.

Something else to sink in: Industrial regulation in China rarely meets international standards. It's rife with corruption -- with sewage plants that only operate the one day a government official comes by, for example. Plastic recycling centers that never bothered to buy the government-required sanitation equipment. So it's great that finally there are some rules in place. Is there any real belief that they will be enforced?

We buy stuff from China because it's cheap. It's cheap because we send over countless tons of our used plastic to a nation that has so far been incapable of effectively or honestly overseeing how that material gets re-used.

Change the game.

Hunger

In Tolkien's Silmarillion -- the backstory mythology to the Lord of the Rings -- there is the tale of Ungoliant, one of the original "gods" who came to earth, and turned to evil.

"Melkor Calls Forth Ungoliant" by
renowned artist John Howe

Ungoliant took the form of an enormous black spider, and she began spinning & weaving webs to catch light. She hungered for light. She devoured & consumed it. Everywhere on earth that she roamed, she consumed. And yet her hunger grew, and grew. She even entered the Blessed Realm and devoured the very light of the Two Trees of Valinor, and cast darkness across the realm.

But she wasn't satisfied. Grown horrible in size & might, she kept on consuming -- loving light & hating it wherever she found it. Eventually, she holed up in dark mountains of the mortal world. There, she spun webs through the long years, and consumed, and darkness spread out in all directions.

And she bred offspring, huge beasts of terror and evil. When her offspring grew of age, she mated with them, and hungered for them, and consumed them.

Eventually she had no more mates, and no more offspring. There was no more light, no more food. And yet her hunger still grew. Never satisfied, never fulfilled, always growing. Finally, in the end, sitting in absolute darkness and doubled over with hunger, she consumed herself.

The image above, linked from Inhabitat, was created three years ago by artist & filmmaker Chris Jordan of Midway Journey fame. It consists of 2.4 million individual scraps of plastic, all pulled from the Pacific Ocean. 2,400,000 is a significant number: it represented (at the time) how many pounds of plastic were estimated to be entering the oceans of the world every hour.

Do you think that rate has gone down, or up, since then?

Flotsam by Another Name

In this case, "sewage."

We don't often think much about where our waste goes. It's an inescapable part of life. And really, it's always just gone "away," right? But really, there is no "away." Sewage goes into our waterways, and greater populations mean far more of the stuff to deal with. Poor stewardship in one place can cause harm far downstream.

We're starting to learn this. Most people now get that the Ganges provides dangerously polluted drinking water to millions, or that farm/field waste pouring into major rivers worsens oceanic dead zones. But stewardship isn't just the purview of cities & nations & factory farms. How individuals and local businesses handle their waste can impact the environment as well. Which is why the Twice Brewed Inn in rural Northumberland, UK is a nice ray of light.

Downtown Twice Brewed, Tynedale, Northumberland, UK

The "Twicey" sits in the majestic central region of Hadrian's Wall -- the ancient Roman border wall built at the far northwest of the empire 1900 years ago. Hikers, wall-walkers, tourists, and archaeology volunteers from nearby Vindolanda call on the Twice Brewed for a clean bed, a hearty breakfast/dinner, good ale, and a lot of laughter. It's by far the busiest place in central Wall Country.

It also generates the most sewage in the area. For decades that sewage was treated by an aging, underpowered septic system out back. A tank collected solid waste, the liquid flowing into a stony "leach field" underground, where it percolated through the soil. Polluted leachate seeped into a small stream nearby, flowing from there into Brackies Burn, then Chinely Burn, and finally the river South Tyne, eventually emptying into the North Sea 40 miles away.

When it finally came time to redo the system, pub owner Brian Keen wanted to do things better. So instead of another tank and leach field, he installed a revolutionary new system. And by "revolutionary new" I mean "millennia old." The system still starts with a tank for solid waste. But then, the liquid is run through several steps to super-clean it before it re-enters the stream:

Aerator with rocks for sifting liquid to...

Two wetland pools (each the size of a shipping
container) stocked with local marsh grass to...

Piping down to streambed in valley

The aerator separates out the last of the solids and gets oxygen into the liquid. It's then piped by gravity to the two consecutive wetland pools. The pools act like a sponge and slow down the water flow along its course. The marsh grasses pull out a small percent of waste, and natural bacterial action takes care of the rest. By the end, what flows out of the last piping into the stream is clean, drinkable water! Instead of waste left to percolate & die deep underground over months or years, oxygen & bacteria attack it right away. Nature's recycling.

The only scent comes from the aerator. (It's not vile, and rarely reaches beyond the immediate vicinity.) The system has one moving part -- the aerator has a catch basin that tips out the liquid evenly among the aerator rocks when it gets filled. The two wetland pools can have their water level raised or lowered if needed -- though they self-regulate amazingly well. It's all so simple. And the cost was half a traditional setup.

So now, a pub/inn that can sleep dozens of people each night and serve over a hundred with drinks & dinner is also among the cleanest, best stewards of the area's waterways. (It's also a proud member of Britain's Green Tourism board, and uses a lot of innovation to conserve without sacrificing convenience.)

Generally the Flotsam Diaries is about... well... non-organic waste & pollution. But it's all part of the same story. And it's great to see folks doing their part to make the world a bit cleaner for all of us.

---

Note: Neither I nor the Flotsam Diaries received any promotional consideration for the above. It just seemed like a good idea. Brian & Pauline have been very kind to this traveler for many years now, and I'm thrilled to get a chance to repay the favor in a small way.

Confessions

I sometimes drink bottled water instead of tap.

I sometimes eat fast food.

I use a plastic throwaway straw once a week or so.

I occasionally buy bags of chips, or plastic-wrapped candies.

Once in a while, I toss something I could've recycled.

I've been known to lose litter & not retrieve it.

I've bought "cheaper" instead of "more eco."

I fly in airplanes long distance for fun.

I drove an oil-dripping muscle car.

I then drove an oil-dripping rust-bucket V8 pickup truck.

I then drove a 4-wheel-drive SUV.

I shun our local public transporation because it's inconvenient.

I sometimes judge people who pollute more than I do.

I sometimes judge people who pollute less than I do.

Now and then, what I crave most of all is an ice-cold Coke.

The past couple of years for me has been a slow wake-up. A chance to realize that there is such a thing as sustainable, sensitive living. That it matters -- that it's imperative. I realize now the level of damage that comes with some of the choices & options of modern life. Both to my generation and to the next. I see it, and pick it up, every week. Washed in, left behind. I admire the people who bend over backwards to put a full stop to it in their lives. I read their blogs, and nod in appreciation.

Still, I also recognize that my world is one of baby steps. I find a new way to consume less here. Waste less there. Reuse here, recycle there. I pick up more of what I see, which helps me see more to pick up.

But I've never been the one to make the grand gesture, the bold pledge, the cold-turkey quit. That, I leave to others.

I take pride in the choices I make now compared to a few years ago. But as I write on the ills of waste & thoughtlessness, I do so with a sense of my own limits. With the humility that, for all my talk and efforts, I too have been -- and continue to be -- part of a mainstream culture that most highly values the impulse of the moment over all else.

Scale

This week I visited Bay View beach at high-tide. The surf crashed loud & angrily against the shore's steep winter slope. Waves converged, criss-crossed, creating a foamy froth on the ocean's crests. It all felt so powerful.

And then I woke up yesterday morning, turned on the TV, and witnessed images of true power.

Original picture found at http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/
slideshow?articleId=USRTR2JQY6#a=10

Lives lost, possessions lost, foundations of entire communities, lost. Pulverized, and then swept out by a pitiless sea.

For much of the day, I reflected on my time at the ocean this past year. I felt small. I, and my trash bag, and my camera, and my little section of shore. Not threatened by any Ring of Fire -- or any other monumental force likely to utterly reshape my coastline.

I reflected on the scale of what I had witnessed. "My" flotsam comes from single events. Human-scale events. A beachgoer loses a plastic sauce-packet in the sand; it's dragged out to sea, colonized by marine life, and eventually tossed back up. A diner at a pier-side restaurant loses her grip on a menu, dropping it into the bay; it travels 100 miles and finally washes in on my shore.

What just happened to Japan isn't a human-scale event. The ocean has just claimed the better part of several towns and cities, first blasting them to bits, and then sucking much of the mass back out into the wild Pacific. People, memories, priceless cultural artefacts, plastic forks -- it doesn't care. It can't care.

Much of what washed away will melt, and rot, and end. Much will sink to the seafloor, slowly to be covered by sediment, maybe to create curious fossils in some future landscape. But much will persist, and float, and enter a wider world.

Pic from http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean
Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

Bobbing on the waves off Japan's east coast, much of this wreckage will travel a few miles southward or eastward, joining the Kuroshio Current. There it will cross the vast expanse of the Pacific. In about a year and a half, pieces of it will start appearing along the coast of Washington and Oregon.* Bits will break off to the north, following the Alaska Current up toward the Arctic. Most will curve southward, following the California Current, depositing bits and pieces along the coast of California and Baja California. From there it will follow the North Equatorial Current past the southern tip of Hawaii, leaving more of its mass there. Eventually, much of the wreckage will rediscover the Kuroshio Current. In about 6.5 years, Japanese fishermen may find pieces of 2011's destruction caught among their lines and nets.^

And on and on, until every last scrap of this tragedy ends up beached, buried, or utterly disintegrated back into its building blocks... however many centuries (millennia?) that will take.

We hear talk that recycling will end the pollution of the sea. But beyond the industry's questionable arguments, a larger fact looms. We are at the mercy of a merciless planet. As long as we fill our daily lives with material that can't return to the dust it came from, we will keep filling our oceans with its toxic legacy.

My heart and thoughts go out to everybody affected by the tsunami of 2011.

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* Ebbesmeyer, C. and Scigliano, E. Flotsametrics and the Floating World. HarperCollins (New York, 2009): p. 143.
^ Ibid. p. 235.