The Long Road

My friend Danielle of It Starts With Me and her family have picked up over 40,000 cigarette butts from Wrightsville Beach, NC. And counting.

This, by any measure in a sane world, would be insane. Knowing this, Danielle and the Cape Fear branch of Surfrider helped organize a town meeting last night to push for a ban on smoking at the beach.

Surfrider's campaign posters
are top-notch

Despite a packed house filled with a sea of supporters in blue shirts reading "Breathe Easy / Keep it Clean" (some 90% of the room supported the ban), the council voted 3-2 against.

In Portland, Maine it took until February 2012 for the city even to acknowledge that a plastic cigarette butt, loaded with a cocktail of toxic chemicals, was litter!

Monument Square, Portland, ME
(image from the Portland Press Herald online)

Let that sink in for a moment. The first rumblings of the ill-effects of cigarettes came in the 1940s. By 1970, cigarette advertising was banned from TV. The Tobacco Wars of the early 1990s ended with the universal understanding that cigarettes are dangerous, and deadly. Yet it took 20 more years for Maine's largest city to identify a cigarette butt as litter.

Last week I visited the Maine Fishermen's Forum up in Rockland at the beautiful Samoset Resort, overlooking rocky cliffs and a foggy sea. The fishing industry in the Gulf of Maine has reeled from one crisis to another for decades. Pollution, overfishing, acidification, sea-temperature rise -- these are putting tremendous pressure on fish stocks. So much of this comes back to simple mistreatment of the fishery & the environment. Yet judging by the view I saw out on the covered walkway...

100 more all around the can and snowy sidewalk

...care for the environment isn't high on the radar.

Since I started the Flotsam Diaries, I've pulled about 1/2 mile of fishing rope from local beaches.

200 more feet pulled up at Curtis Cove, Biddeford
on March 7, 2012

It's all plastic -- nylon or polypropylene. It will last forever, in some form. What I've retrieved represents the tiniest percent of what's certainly out there. I've also recorded several dozen derelict lobster traps washed up. Here's 30 or so from Goose Rocks Beach, Kennebunk, last year:

Each trap is vinyl-coated, and each slowly releases 1000 chunks of toxic polymers as the steel rusts. Conservatively there are half a million derelict lobster traps on the seafloor in the Gulf of Maine. The number is probably far higher.

Yet Maine has no regulations for monitoring lost rope. If a lobsterman loses a trap, they fill out a form. But that paper form goes into a stack, with nobody really examining where it was lost. Even if the location was known, there are ZERO funds in the state to recover any of the gear.

So the problems grow. And heads remain firmly buried in the sand.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. More and more cities are taking cigarette litter seriously. Even Portland, finally. More and more are taking grocery-bag and other plastic litter seriously. And the state of Washington has just passed ground-breaking regulation to monitor and help clean up fishing debris. There are fingerposts and guides the world over showing the good that can happen when you admit a problem exists & then fight it like you mean it.

Change can be a long road. I know all too well that it can feel sometimes like a hopeless road. But at least it's a road. Can you imagine life if there were no roads to take you somewhere beyond where you are?

Collection Report Oct 24, 2011

Monday, October 24. Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. 1:25PM, a couple hours before low tide. The latest high-tide had been fairly weak, and there was little new wrack/seaweed. An overcast day, 60 degrees and deliciously fall-like.

The cooler days & quieter beach gave me a little time to reflect. On ephemeral rivulets:

A seagull's walk, interrupted

And the wealth of color & texture strewn about:

It's funny what you see, when you just stop & look at a handful of sand and pebbles. (After all, in Maine, that sand may have 600 million years of history behind it.) Even with a weak tide, this was a great day for wash-ins -- slipper shells, blue mussels, tons of crab, a few fish bones. A real treat. Of course, nowadays the modern world always intrudes, though often in colorful ways:

1/1000th of one of the ~1 million lobster
traps on the floor of the Gulf of Maine

Which, I guess, brings me back to the point of a collection report. So, on to it. First, Zone N:

82 finds:

• Building materials: 7 (5 asphalt, brick, wood block)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 14
• Fishing misc.: 7 (3 rope, rope twine, shell wadding, claw band, trap vinyl coating)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (plasticized cupcake base?)
• Food-related metal/glass: 3 (foil wrappers)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (5 bags/scraps, tube, 2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 36
• Paper/wood: 1 (paper scrap)
• Misc./unique: 2 (fabric scrap, odd piece of paper with thin wires embedded)

A wide range, but mostly the usual suspects. (Why any of this should be "usual" is another question.) Sad to see so many cigarette butts, but hardly surprised. 5.5 trillion are used in the world each year. If even 90% of those were disposed of properly, that's still about 17,500 tossed on the ground every second. Every second. It's not sustainable, and change is in the air. Where that will leave smokers in the end is, largely, up to smokers to decide.

Over to Zone S:

31 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6
• Fishing misc.: 11 (4 rope, Plante bumper, 3 trap scraps, twine, 2 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (Gatorade label scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (scraps >1", scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (4 cigs, 1 filter)
• Paper/wood: 2 (firecracker sticks)
• Misc./unique: 0

Nothing to see here. Except maybe the big black trap corner bumper, nicely stamped with the maker, "PLANTE" on the side. Also, curiously, there are two other words embossed: "CANADA" and "U.S." The "CANADA" had been X'ed out, making this seemingly meant for U.S. traps. Wonder what law/regulation is behind that. Such a regulated industry, yet still leaving such a legacy of debris.

As I was leaving, I noticed this scrawled on a drift-log up in Zone N.

I study the accidental ways we leave pieces of ourselves behind. Here's an intentional one. A hope for a little permanence in an ephemeral world. A reminder that Joyce was here. But a reminder to whom, again? Maybe it doesn't matter. She left, but for a while at least her presence is still at Bay View.

Collection Report Sep 3, 2011

Well, Irene came and went. On Sunday, August 28, cutting more westerly than expected, she hit Saco Bay, Maine with her east flank. 40-50mph winds rocked the coastline all day. But the worst & last of her winds came from W/SW. From inland out to sea. Here's her waning power on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 28:

Scour (Aug. 28, 2011, 6:30PM)

And here's Bay View the next morning, after the midnight high tide had come and gone:

And rinse (Aug. 29, 2011, 8:30AM)

And there you go. Hurricane/TS Irene ruined communities up and down the east coast. But at Bay View, all she left was an utterly clean slate. Not even a dollop of seaweed. All thanks to wind direction (and maybe to the long Saco River jetty a mile down south).

The rest of the week was warm & sunny. The perfect ending to an epic Maine summer. So it's little surprise that when I got back on September 3, there was junk. Though taking away this still-smouldering Bacchanal...

Poor showing

...the haul would have been small. (Note to partiers: Dumping your plastic in an open-air bonfire doesn't make it go away. Pretty much everything you did here reflects badly on you.) As it was, the haul wasn't small. Zone N:

146 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 36
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, buoy scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 22 (4 cups, 5 food wrappers, 4 straw wrappers, 2 cup lids, 3 bottlecaps, 2 bottles, straw, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 19 (14 cans, Jaegermeister bottle, beer bottle, 2 bottlecaps, foil wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 19 (5 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, 4 toy scraps, 5 scraps >1", 4 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 35 (34 filters, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 10 (9 paper scraps, 1 wood firecracker stick)
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric pieces, battery)

After all of Irene's fury, Bay View Zone N got maybe 2-3 pieces of ocean-borne debris. A bit of rope, a buoy scrap, and maybe this stained, abraded bottle cap:

The stories you could tell...

On the other hand, Irene probably blew away 40-50 cigarette butts (edit: 40-50 from Zone N; probably hundreds from the rest of Bay View), and who knows what else?

Zone S, always low on litter this year, offers little more enlightenment:

28 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 19 (!)
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rope twine)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (scrap of spoon/fork, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

The only thing of note: the spike in styrofoam over the usual Zone S finds.

A day after the storm, I watched a video of a 140-year-old covered bridge in Vermont washing away into splinters from the raging torrents. That was Irene's reality for so many of my fellow Northeasterners. At Bay View beach, ~20 pieces of styrofoam may well be the best -- the only -- evidence for Irene. With that, and the removal of one wonky tree along the 3-mile route between my condo and the beach, she was well and truly gone from Saco, Maine. We got lucky. My heart goes out to those who didn't.

Collection Report Aug 4, 2011

Thursday, August 4, 7:22 AM. Seagulls crying in the distance. Flipflops left by the lifeguard tower, a ratty beach chair folded up & stowed away. (Forgotten?) Fog slowly burning off. Welcome to Bay View, Saco, Maine:

Still love seeing a beach like this

The week brought a little more energy to Bay View. Recent tides had crept higher up the shore, a few bits tumbled in from the deep ocean. But in general, the word of this day was still "dull." In fact, the above is the only picture I took while out and about. This had basically been another busy beach week, with busy-beach trash. Here's Zone N:

229 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt chunks)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 15
• Fishing misc.: 17 (4 rope, 8 pieces of rope twine unfurled from impromptu "art" on shore, 4 claw bands, 1 trap tag)
• Food-related plastics: 32 (15 food wrappers, 3 fresh fruit stickers, 7 straw wrappers, 4 bottle caps, straw, chewing gum, spoon scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 10 (burned tin can, 4 bottle caps, 2 foil wrappers, 2 sea glass, pull tab)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 32 (9 bags/scraps, balloon, 2 bandaids, flosser, watergun stopper, sunglasses, rubberband, tie strap, pen cap, twist-tie, 5 ribbon bits, dessicant, 7 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 93 (89 cigarettes, 4 plastics)
• Paper/wood: 21 (13 paper scraps, 7 firecracker sticks, popsicle stick)
• Misc./unique: 5 fabric scraps

Going on the record here, I hate these things:

Fresh fruit, now with more plastic!

I know, of all the things to hate. But it's so unnecessary. Even a person trying to be healthy, eating an unpackaged piece of fresh fruit -- instead of corn syrup, salt, and modified food starch -- ends up with plastic at the end of their snack. Why, and how, did we do this in just a couple generations?

The other thing I hate:

I have 2100 more at home

The cigarette numbers have been lower on the beach than last year. I hate that I'm kind of happy to "only" find 89 of these in a week. And the parking lot that I scoured in June is utterly trashed with them again. (But I have exciting news on that front, which I'll only tease with here. Maybe somebody will take the Bait?)

Anyway, food packs, cigarettes, And a quick view of Zone S:

31 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (fence slat)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 5 (fishing rope twine, from another decayed bit of art)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (food wrapper scrap, straw wrapper, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scrap, sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 7 (firecracker, tape, 1 scrap >1", 4 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 6
• Paper/wood: 2 (popsicle stick, firework stick)
• Misc./unique: 1 (tiny scrap of fabric)

Wow. There is just nothing to say about this. Wouldn't it be nice to think that a long stretch of Saco Bay really stayed this relatively clean week after week?

Ashes to Ashes, Part III

Long-time readers may remember that I'm doing a cigarette filter decay test (first post here, November followup here). It's been almost two months since my last update, so it seemed a good time for a new one!

The premise was simple: I'd read that cigarette butts are plastic, cellulose acetate, and that they don't break down like natural fibers. So I wanted to see if it was true. My experiment began on August 28, 2010, with a freshly scavenged cigarette butt. I plunked it into a bucket of fresh water to simulate it being tossed into a gutter and carried to a nearby river or stream.

Day 1

Each day I swirled the water 25 times to simulate the scouring effect of the river. Over the next five weeks, the cigarette butt became waterlogged & sank, and the paper started flaking off.

Day 35

At Day 3537, I switched to saltwater to simulate the filter reaching the ocean. I then added a rock for extra scouring, and upped my daily swirls to 50. I tossed in a piece of paper flotsam too, for comparison.

Day 37

By a little over two months, the receipt was a mushy pulp, and the filter paper was gone.

Day 69

But the cigarette lived on.

Day 69-b

Which is where I left it off.

Three weeks later, November 26, it still looked mostly the same - tar stains and all.

Day 91

Then it occurred to me that something was lacking. I had the seawater right, and the sand at the bottom, and the rock, and the swirling. But I hadn't added any new life - I hadn't added the micro-organisms that could potentially digest this thing and break it down. So on December 1 I added a couple teaspoons of yeast. Would anything happen?

Day 99 - December 4

Why yes. Yes something would happen! It worked like a charm. The yeast activated (slowly - the water was only room temperature after all). Within a few days it had devoured the paper pulp and left a brown, slightly smelly residue in the bottom and along the sides of the bin. But the cigarette butt? Unchanged, unaffected. Uneaten.

Moving on through Hannukah, my early-December birthday, and finally Christmas, we come to today, December 30, 2010:

Day 125

Day 125 - Ready for the closeup

So. More than 4 months in, under fairly savage treatment, attacked by sand, rock, swirl stick, bacteria, light, water, salt. And this still looks like what it is: a used, fouled cigarette butt.

Cigarette butts are a scourge. They are everywhere. In gutters, playgrounds, plantings, parks. Flicked out of car windows, stubbed out at the beach. I've recovered some 2,000 from Bay View. Danielle Richardet in North Carolina has collected over 12,000! With no sign of stopping.

They're not just ugly, they're poison. One used cigarette butt in two gallons of water is enough to kill the low-order life in that water. The world produces 5.5 trillion cigarettes each year. If only 10% of those were littered, that's still 550 billion -- 550,000,000,000 -- cigarette butts polluting our world. Each year. Here's a handy list of just a few of those pollutants:

Pick any, they're all good

And, as I hope I'm starting to show, they don't break down. That cigarette your co-worker flicked into the gutter last winter? Still around. The cigarette your careless buddy tossed out the car window a decade or two ago when you were all young & crazy? Still around.

But don't worry, it's got plenty of company.

Collection Report Sept 18-19, 2010

After a week hiatus, Saturday September 18 saw me back at Bay View beach, my journalist friend Rick with me. We got there about 9AM, and spent close to three hours wandering, collecting, and chatting through Zone N. Try imagining this picture in July or August:

View of Zone N at 11:00AM; summer is definitely over

Other than one sunbather (who had abandoned Kennebunkport's beaches due to the dog waste), we had the place almost all to ourselves. It was a great walk, and a great talk. And, strangely, really nice to be bagging debris again. Even the ugly and the stinky:

Post-season revelries

Chum-laced fishing net

In a turn that will surprise nobody, the cooler weather and end of summer vacation brought a change in the haul from weeks past. Zone N, laid out:

219 finds:

• Building material: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 8
• Fishing misc.: 6 (3 claw bands, 1 piece of lobster trap bumper, flare shell, plus large netting with rotted chum -- tossed out at beach, not brought home!)
• Food-related plastics: 14 (inc. bottle with lid sawn off??)
• Food-related metal/glass: 14
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 29 (inc. shopping bag & bag bits, bucket handle broken in two, rotted structural plastic chunk/end cap (?), nylon rope, small red rosette, multi-pin computer board piece (?), white leaf (matched one found September 4), claw-shaped thing like many found before)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 129 (122 local, 4 likely floaters, 3 plastics)
• Paper/wood: 16 (inc. kite instructions)
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 bits of firework and gum)

The food and beach plastics are way down. Sadly, the cigarette count -- and non-food plastics -- are just as high.

As always, there were surprises, plus a couple poignant moments.

Do I want to know why this was modified?

Irony

More irony

The next morning, I finally made a return to Zone S. I hadn't done a collection there for a few weeks (busy weeks at that, with a windstorm and a hurricane near-miss!). So it's hard to say much about the numbers here. But at least this will give me a new "autumn" baseline.

The goods:

104 finds:

• Building material: 2
• Foam/styrofoam: 6
• Fishing misc.: 4 (3 claw bands, 1 piece of lobster trap bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 11 (inc. Dairy Queen sundae cup and spoon, Slim Jim, Laffy Taffy, Wrigley Spearmint, GoGurt Strawberry Splash, Stringsters String Cheese)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (inc. aluminum can with spongy mass (fish eggs??) growing all over it)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 16 (VO5 Tea Therapy label, shampoo top, hard red lens/cap edge, small green cap from a mist bottle (?), bubblewrap with tape, orange toy chain (?) scrap, scrap of rigid gray wire sheath)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 58 (35 local, 23 likely floaters)
• Paper/wood: 3
• Misc./unique: 2 (faded & tattered flag, tennis ball)

The biggie of this? 23 "floater" cigarettes -- the paper stripped away, the filter mesh bleached white. After everything I've learned about the sheer scale of cigarette trash, it's not surprising. But it's still a wake-up to see it. How many more are polluting our waters right now? How many more are being added every day?

Here's a few of the other highlights from my return to Zone S.

Expecting a winter full of these

A long and tortured tale

Mmm. Life...

Colorful "Huh??"s

So, as Maine transitions from beach weather to decidedly -not- beach weather, the finds are shifting. I'm all set to watch, record, and catalog it. And, as always, try to learn a thing or two.

Collection Report August 18, 2010

A bit late getting this one up. But at long last!

August 18 greeted me with a few breaking clouds & a coolish breeze, the first reminder that our summer is winding down.

It's that time of year where there's a tension in the air -- an expectation. More people are on the road, trying to squeeze out the last bit of vacation. Folks are getting to the beach earlier, lingering longer. Minds are focused on anything but the return to school, layers, jackets. Which might explain how someone could forget this:

Cushy chair, cold drink, tasty snacks... *POOF* Just walked away. Confession: I did not put this into my bag & record it.

Second confession. I also didn't count everything I did pick up. I took a moment from bagging to dump several dozen jagged remnants of a Bacchanal into the metal trash bin on-site:

Always comforting what people will leave in the sand.

On to the finds. Zone N (which I really thought was going to be small):

It wasn't small. 266 finds:

• Building material: 3 (sawn blocks & part of a plank/clapboard)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 9 (inc. another part of the airplane that I started finding back on July 27)
• Fishing misc.: 2 (claw bands, one fresh & one a bit jagged)
• Food-related plastics: 37 (inc. 5 water/soda bottles plus 3 burned bits of bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 13 (inc. a piece of what was just starting to turn into worn-down seaglass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 32 (inc. 5 bandaids, balloon, shovel handle, action figure arm, packaging reading "Toys $2.99", orange plastic nozzle)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 112 (101 fresh, 6 floaters, 5 packaging - including cigar pack with 7 wrapped cigars still inside)
• Paper/wood: 44 (inc. piece from Spanish-language magazine, fireworks packaging (still from July 4th??), business card, pail & shovel label, umbrella tag, bath towel tag)
• Misc./unique: 14 (inc. size XS ripped shorts, sock, 3 wads of gum, several tattered string/rope scraps)

Another colorful, if mostly predictable, collection. A few standouts:

Somebody's ultra-army is a tad sadder now

Four "Huh?"s

Foam from same original objects every week

Moving on to Zone S, which, as usual, was rather subdued:

54 finds:

• Building material: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 10
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 3 (inc. two burned things)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 5 (inc. very aged/brittle little capsule holder?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 31 (27 fresh + 4 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 2
• Misc./unique: 1 (sea glass)

It's funny, sea glass always seems to be a Zone S thing. And as an example of what happens when plastic sits out too long:

Photodegradation, in all its glory!

Big takeaway from this week: People at the beach just can't seem to help burning stuff. And a second takeaway: You can toss that plastic bottle or wrapper into a roaring fire pit, but when the party's over and the embers die, it hasn't gone away.

I'll end this week with a teaser. If you're getting tired of the same old beach trash week to week, you're not alone. (People go to beach and litter, dog bites man.) But I was back there this morning. Yesterday (August 25) it rained all day, with some pretty serious winds too. Here's what I saw at 8:00AM:

A hint: It wasn't just kelp that washed up