Collection Report Aug 19, 2011

Gotten behind on these again! Then again, if I'm being honest, I find summer collection reports, well, dull. Sure, there's a little that washes in. But there's so much local beachgoer garbage. Such a stark reminder of why it's such an uphill climb trying to restore & reclaim the pristine beauty of wild places.

Still, 7:15AM on Friday, August 19 was gorgeous, no two ways about it.

Rise and shine

And nothing was going to spoil the enjoyment of a nice walk in the early day. Not this:

Cheers!

Or this:

Art!

Instead, I took a little time to study the beauty, like the dune grass that is quickly reclaiming several feet of foreshore.

This was beach in 2010

Funny. Dune grass, like a piece of flotsam, has a story to tell. When it's been windy, the blades bend & drag through the sand, leaving concentric rings (like these from back in Oct 2010). When it's been calm, no rings. Even without Weather Underground, it doesn't take long to see that there's no sign of strong winds at the beach this week. (Remember, this is pre-Irene.)

So, not surprisingly, a busy, summery collection. Zone N:

198 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (2 wood, 1 tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 11
• Fishing misc.: 13 (5 rope, 4 claw bands, 3 rope twine, shotgun shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 31 (12 food wrappers, 7 straw wrappers, 4 bottle caps, bottle, straw, fork scrap, bread tag, gum, milk cap ring, cap seal, fruit label) 
• Food-related metal/glass: 11 (3 cans, glass bottle, 6 caps, foil food wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknowng plastics: 36 (11 bags/scraps, 4 toys/scraps, 2 non-food caps, 2 strappings, 2 ribbon, footing, bandaid, 3 scraps >1", 10 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 71 (69 cigarettes, filter tip, Kodiak pack)
• Paper/wood: 18 (12 paper scraps, chip, popsicle stick, firework, 3 firework sticks)
• Misc./unique: 4 (2 string bits, 2 metal barrettes)

Except for a few left-behinds from the Sep '10 seaweed wash-in, this is a summer signature. Picked up another intact shovel for the collection, and a nice French-made barrette with turquoise stones. And this -very- salt-scarred steel bottlecap.

Help me!

On to Zone S:

22 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 5
• Fishing misc.: 2
• Food-related plastics: 6 (2 bottle caps, 3 food wrappers, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknowng plastics: 3 (firecracker, 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (3 filters, 2 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Yawn. A 20-second walk from Zone N to Zone S. A completely different world.

Collection Report June 2, 2011

After far too long, the last couple collection reports of my first full year at Bay View beach, Saco, Maine are on their way.

June 2, 10:30AM. Moody skies on this first collection post-Memorial Day. Even if I didn't know the date, two big clues that unofficial summer had started:

The trash bins are crowning

and:

The half-burned bonfires are back

This was an odd day. A mix of local debris, such as a little nest of cigarette butts all clustered together, buried in the sand by a lingering chainsmoker; and washed-in debris, such as the plethora of fresh & far-traveled lobster claw bands that I mentioned in this post.

Fancy meeting you here

And then there's this:

Surely a good story here

So, on to the details of what was a busy day. Zone N:

174 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (asphalt chunk, slat)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 65 (27 from one cooler, 11 colored bits, 2 big clamshells, 25 plate/clamshell pieces)
• Fishing misc.: 18 (8 claw bands, 5 rope, 3 twine from rope, monofilament in seaweed, shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (bottle cap, straw wrapper, Hershey's wrapper, sour candy wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 12 (3 cans, 2 burned cans, scrap, 2 bottle caps, gum wrapper, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 21 (6 bag/film, prescription bottle, 2 rubber bands, "hoodie" tag, water gun cap, another cap (?), 4 scraps >1", 5 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 40 (38 filters, plastic filter, cigar pack)
• Paper/wood: 9 (wooden duck (?), 6 food labels, weight warning, cardboard disk)
• Misc./unique: 3 (nonfishing woven rope, 2 metal necklaces)

65 pieces of styrofoam and a wooden duck cutout. You can't make this stuff up.

On to Zone S:

81 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (2 asphalt scraps, plywood scrap)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 40 (10 cooler bits (?), 11 colored bits, 19 misc)
• Fishing misc.: 6 (Canada band, rope, 4 twines from rope)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (Heinz label, 2 mini straws, 2 milk cap seals)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 20 (5 odd shredded tubes, golf ball, pen, 2 strappings, twine, 3 bag/film, 7 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 3 (2 firework sticks, paper wipe)
• Misc./unique: 0

40 more pieces of styrofoam, most probably from the same cooler, etc. that started crumbling apart up in Zone N. Wonder how much plastic pollution one styrofoam cooler can create? This much.

I also started finding something that stumped me. (Which is getting harder to do.) Check it out:

What the heck?

Each looks about the size & weight of the cap to a ball-point pen. But they're not. 2" long, hollow, gray, hard plastic. Fairly intact on one end, but each one is exploded on the other end. Rusty inside, as though a piece of thick steel wire/cable was inside; unless it's powder residue? Any thoughts?

Anyway, this one week I collected 255 new pieces of trash. From a lazy, fairly quiet beach in southern Maine. On a day when winds prevailed from the west, and probably had already blown quite a bit back out into the bay.

Summer, she is back.

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