Collection Report July 6-7, 2010

(Broke this one into two days, coz 7/6 pinged the mercury at 82 degrees before 7:30AM.)

Bay View public beach, Saco, Maine, following the fabled 4th of July weekend. And a sweltering one at that. The aftermath was going to be interesting, for sure.

First, new sign on the lifeguard station:

Effective?

A new one-week record for cigarette butts from zone N suggests otherwise. But if you get lemons, make lemonade. This week's "bounty" got me thinking of a new way to look at cig waste. I started separating out filters that looked ocean-borne (paper wrapper missing, bleached/washed filter). It may be possible to tease out a bit more of the story from these little pockets of poison. (Yes, appearances can deceive, which is why I'm already noodling ways to test whether a filter has been immersed in seawater.)

All told, predictable remains from a busy week. Zone N, July 6:

304 finds in total:

• Building materials: 2
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12
• Fishing misc: 3 (1 rope, two fairly fresh claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 59
• Food-related metal/glass: 8
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 41 (inc., 2 Trojan wrappers and 1 photographed but uncollected Trojan... gack; untossed bag of dog poop... gack; yellow hair roller, pail handle, 3 bandaids, 2 small pieces of broken vinyl from a lobster trap cage, Blistex tube, Home Depot price tag for a sling chair -- $19.98!)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 121 (112 local cigs, 8 likely ocean-borne, 1 wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 25 (inc. Subway sandwich wrapper, Slush Puppie cup, Earl & Wilson beach towel tag, beach hut instructions, Skimboard user guide, AutoZone receipt, matchbox)
• Misc./unique: 33 (23 firework pieces, one boy's jersey, one flipflop, one toddler "water shoe," one black sock, one white sock, one piece of rubber sole, 3 plastic tie-bands, 1 kite string/handle)

Zone S (July 7) was, as usual, much cleaner, and in many ways much more interesting.

48 finds:

• Building materials: 5
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rubber lobster trap bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 3
• Food-related metals/glass: 3
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 7
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 25 (17 local cigs, 7 likely ocean-borne, 1 wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 2
• Misc./unique: 1 (piece of firework)

Again, less foot traffic = less disturbance. Stuff that washes in doesn't move around as much as at zone N. It's still got its context. I managed to find many pieces lying at high-tide line right where the sea had last dumped them:

What does ocean-tumbled plastic and cigarette waste look like? Just like these things. Context!

So, the celebration of our nation's founding brought extra waste and litter to a beautiful beach. But it also brought more opportunities to learn. Which is, after all, the point.

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.

-----------------------------------------------

* 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.