Beach cleanup removes tons of garbage from South Florida beaches

Published on CBS News by David Fleshler, Sun Sentinel

 
Volunteers also collect all the caps that are found all over the beach and donate them to the non-profit Caps of Love that takes them. (Lourdes Ferris / Keep Palm Beach County Beautiful / May 21, 2014)

PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. -- A car door, a mailbox and a set of plastic vampire teeth were among the items picked up off Palm Beach County beaches as part of a worldwide event to clean coastlines and waterways.

A total of 17,431 pounds trash were collected in Palm Beach County during the International Coastal Cleanup, an annual event run last summer and fall by the Ocean Conservancy, according to a tally made public Wednesday.

The most common items were cigarette butts, with 11,463 collected, followed by bottle caps, food wrappers, straws, bottles and plastic bags.

Also collected were 118 condoms, 28 diapers, 82 syringes and 138 tampons or tampon applicators.

A total of 3,240 volunteers walked beaches from Boca Raton to Jupiter and cleaned up many inland areas as well.

"We take the position that anyplace in Palm Beach County where there is litter it could get to the beach, carried by wind and rain," said Lourdes Ferris, director of Keep Palm Beach County Beautiful, who coordinated the event. "Everything empties out into some body of water."

Nicholas Mallos, a conservation biologist and marine debris specialist for the Ocean Conservancy, said the 12 million pounds of junk picked up worldwide this year reflected the same mix seen in prior years.

"Unfortunately year after year the same items are on our top 10 lists - disposable food and beverage packaging, cigarettes, plastic forks and knives," he said. "We are overwhelmingly concerned about the presence of plastic, as well as fishing nets and ropes."

A total of 6,847 pounds trash were collected in Broward County and 12,456 in Miami-Dade County, with the list of most common items similar to those found in Palm Beach.

In Broward County, unusual items included a blonde wig and a pair of scissors. In Miami-Dade County, they include a refrigerator, a Bible, more plastic vampire teeth, an urn and a voodoo doll in a jar.

The Ocean Conservancy said further study is needed to find ways to stop trash at its source.

"Ocean trash truly is a global problem that affects human health and safety, endangers marine wildlife, and costs states and nations countless millions in wasted resources and lost revenue," said Andreas Merkl, Ocean Conservancy's president and CEO, on Wednesday. "At its core, however, ocean trash is not an ocean problem; it is a people problem - perpetuated by the often unwitting practices that industry and people have adopted over time. But I am convinced we can solve it if we have the audacity to confront the problem head-on."

The next cleanup will take place Sept. 20.

Plastic trash from the ocean is art at S.F. Zoo

Published in SFGate.com by Jill Tucker, May 24, 2014

• 
  Joe Fitting taps out a beat at the Washed Ashore interactive percussion art exhibit at the SF Zoo in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Zoo visitors will be encouraged to rap, tap and bang on a variety of giant sea life sculptures, created from 11 tons of debris found floating in the Pacific Ocean, that will be on display in the Pachyderm Building until Sept. 23. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

From a distance, the art hanging from the ceiling of the San Francisco Zoo's old elephant area looks like colorful kelp suspended in the ocean.

But get closer.

There, forming part of a strand is a yellow shampoo bottle. And several orange dog balls, half a faded Frisbee, a pink sand shovel, a toddler's shoe. And more. Hundreds, thousands more objects.

The overwhelming amount of trash, most of it plastic, suddenly comes into full focus. All of it came out of the ocean.

The display, open to the public through the summer, is part of the 12 tons of garbage turned art at the zoo's "Buoy, Beat 'n' Bop" exhibition created by the nonprofit Washed Ashore.

"I've created something I hope is beautiful and horrifying," said Angela Haseltine Pozzi, lead artist and executive director of the environmental education group of Oregon.

All of the materials used to create a giant starfish, a suspended wiggly eel, the kelp forest, and a range of fish and sea creatures were gathered by thousands of volunteers on the beaches of Oregon.

 

Trail of trash

Everything was sorted by color and type and then Haseltine Pozzi came up with the ideas for the sculptures, which can be touched, pushed, drummed on and spun.

"The more ways to get people to interact, the more they'll remember it," she said.

A lot of the trash flowed off streets into sewers and down rivers into the ocean, and some of it traveled thousands of miles.

The tail of the 10-foot-long eel is made from a Japanese property marker that probably drifted to Oregon after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Many of the plastic bottles on the 14-foot sea star were from the Beijing Olympics, the dancing figures on the sides unique to the bottles sold at the 2008 Games, Haseltine Pozzi said.

The plastic probably floated in the flotsam and jetsam of the ocean for years before being spit out into a current headed for America. The artist is hard-pressed to say what items are the weirdest or most disturbing.

"We get so much it's hard to say what's weird," she said. "We've just had everything wash up."
The most depressing sculpture is probably the "Fish Bite Fish," made up of bits of plastic that have been chewed on by sea life, the jagged edges an indication that part of the plastic ended up in an ocean animal's belly.

 

Rethinking plastic

Zoo officials say they hope the traveling exhibition, which has appeared in various incarnations at marine centers and other public venues, will spur people to keep better tabs on their trash and rethink the amount of plastic they use.

"This is the first opportunity where close to 300,000 people will see this," said Joe Fitting, the zoo's vice president of conservation and education. "The mission of the zoo is to connect people to the world's places ... to connect you and hopefully change behaviors."

Online extra
To see a video of the exhibition, go to: http://bit.ly/TCVrx5.

Joe Fitting walks through the Washed Ashore interactive percussion art exhibit at the SF Zoo in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Zoo visitors will be encouraged to rap, tap and bang on a variety of giant sea life sculptures, created from 11 tons of debris found floating in the Pacific Ocean, that will be on display in the Pachyderm Building until Sept. 23. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jtucker@sfchronicle.com

Melting polar ice could release trillions of plastic pieces into our oceans

Published in Geek.com by Graham Templeton May. 26, 2014

A new study of arctic ice has found an unusual component in the frozen ocean water that caps our planet: plastics. More precisely, the study has found an incredible density of tiny plastic beads and fibers, scraps collectively called micro plastics.

Though the report can only speculate as to how so much plastic made its way all the way to the South Pole, its predictions for the future are much more concrete: if we melt away the ice in which this plastic is trapped, those micro plastics could be released into the ocean — and there could be a lot of them.

The numbers arise from random samples, and the assumption that most of the ice in the area contains a similar density of micro plastics. If that’s true, we could see as much as a trillion pieces of plastic enter the ocean as Antarctic ice melts.

In particular, scientists have recently been raising alarms about a quickly melting sheet of Antarctic ice known as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and more specifically the Ross Ice Shelf. One report argues that the melting is now in an unstoppable chain reaction that could raise global sea levels by as much as 2 or even 3 meters.

Plastic contaminants are no stranger to the oceans…

Of course, this is all predicted to play out over the course of the next couple of centuries. Also remember that while the release of a trillion pieces of plastic into the oceans is certainly worrying, those pieces of plastic did enter antarctic ice from the ocean.

The sad reality is that, enormous as this slow release of frozen plastic may be, it will likely pale in comparison to the volume of new plastic we’re creating and releasing each and every year.

The particles themselves are mostly made of rayon, polyester, nylon, and a few other common materials. There’s not currently any direct evidence about harmful ecological effects, and certainly no photos of deformed baby animals. Still, scientists seem to have made the rather logical assumption that this much foreign material will almost certainly cause some sort of problem for biology.

The grains can get extremely small, often small enough to slip through the counting filters used to find them, and the researchers warn that such small pieces can often get taken up by animals and held captive in living tissue.

Research is currently ongoing to see what problems, if any, these micro plastics might cause.

Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped in Arctic Ice

Published in Science AAAS by Eric Hand May 22, 2014

D. K. Perovich/CRREL; (inset) S. Sadri/R. C. Thompson/Plymouth University

Missing waste. Ice cores taken from the Arctic Ocean contain small pieces of plastic, such as this blue piece of polypropylene (inset).

Humans produced nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012, but where does it end up? A new study has found plastic debris in a surprising location: trapped in Arctic sea ice. As the ice melts, it could release a flood of floating plastic onto the world.

Scientists already knew that microplastics—polymer beads, fibers, or fragments less than 5 millimeters long—can wind up in the ocean, near coastlines, or in swirling eddies such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But Rachel Obbard, a materials scientist at Dartmouth College, was shocked to find that currents had carried the stuff to the Arctic.

In a study published online this month in Earth’s Future, Obbard and her colleagues argue that, as Arctic ice freezes, it traps floating microplastics—resulting in abundances of hundreds of particles per cubic meter. That’s three orders of magnitude larger than some counts of plastic particles in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It was such a surprise to me to find them in such a remote region,” she says. “These particles have come a long way.”

The potential ecological hazards of microplastics are still unknown. But the ice trap could help solve a mystery: Industrial plastic production has increased markedly in the last half-century, reaching 288 million tonnes in 2012, according to Plastics Europe, an industry association. But ecologists have not been able to account for the final disposition of much of it.

The paper shows that sea ice could be an important sink—albeit one that is melting, says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who was not part of the study. “There could be freely floating plastics, in short order.” The authors estimate that, under current melting trends, more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic could be released in the next decade.

Obbard and her colleagues based their counts on four ice cores gathered during Arctic expeditions in 2005 and 2010. The researchers melted parts of the cores, filtered the water, and put the sediments under a microscope, selecting particles that stood out because of their shape or bright color.

The particles’ chemistry was then determined by an infrared spectrometer. Most prevalent among the particles was rayon (54%), technically not a synthetic polymer because it is derived from natural cellulose. The researchers also found polyester (21%), nylon (16%), polypropylene (3%), and 2% each of polystyrene, acrylic, and polyethylene.

Co-author Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, says it’s difficult to pinpoint the source of these materials. Rayon, for instance, can be found in clothing, cigarette filters, and diapers.

Abundances are likely to grow as scientists learn to sift more finely. Law points out that microplastic estimates for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are based on phytoplankton nets that catch only particles bigger than 333 microns.

Obbard, who used a much smaller 0.22 micron filter, says she still probably missed many particles herself; searching by eye, she easily could have missed brownish or clear plastic particles that were masquerading as sand grains.

What is the consequence of all this plastic floating around? At this point, it is hard to say. Plastic is chemically inert. But the plastic can absorb organic pollutants in high concentrations, says Mark Browne, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Browne has performed laboratory experiments with marine organisms showing not only how the microplastics can be retained in tissues, but also how pollutants might be released upon ingestion.

“We’re starting to worry a bit more,” he says

Ban on microbeads in consumer products gains momentum

Published on CBS News by Bruce Kennedy May 26, 2014


Another state is pushing through legislation that would ban the use of a tiny but apparently environmentally hazardous product found in some popular beauty and skincare products.

On Friday, California's State Assembly voted in favor of a ban on microbeads -- the round bits of plastic, about the size of salt grains, that are used as abrasives in facial scrubs, toothpaste, soaps, bath gels and other products. The bill now moves on to the state Senate.

The bill's sponsor, Democratic Assemblyman Richard Bloom, says microbeads "are a significant part of the debris accumulating in the Pacific Ocean and are also found at alarming levels in our local waterways." Legislators in New York and Illinois are also considering measures that would ban microbeads.

Scientists say the non-biodegradable microbeads absorb chemicals, pesticides and other toxins that can eventually end up in the food chain -- and on our dinner plates. High concentrations of microbeads have also been found in The Great Lakes.

"By the time the plastic gets downstream towards the ocean, they become these toxic pills," Marcus Eriksen, executive director and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, an advocacy group that monitors plastic pollution in the world's oceans, recently told CBS News.

"Even a small microbead, as it tumbles down stream, is picking up all kinds of industrial chemicals."

According to Plastic News, microbeads became increasingly popular over the past decade in cosmetics and other products "as a gentle exfoliating alternative to items such as ground walnut shells, which can have sharp edges that tear sensitive skin or pose an allergy risk to some consumers."

And their popularity is such that the Natural Resources Defense Council reports microbeads can be found in more than 200 different consumer products -- and that Americans annually buy and use cosmetics containing over a half-million pounds of microbeads.

5 Gyres researchers, meanwhile, found that just one tube of a popular facial scrub can contain hundreds of thousands of microbeads.

Several major cosmetic and healthcare companies, including L'Oréal (LRLCY), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Unilever (UN) say they are phasing out the use of plastic microbeads in their products over the next several years.

But trade groups representing cosmetic and personal care product manufacturers are urging the ban be delayed. In April, the D.C.-based Personal Care Products Council called on the Illinois Legislature to hold off on the ban of microbeads until the end of 2017, in order to minimize "marketplace disruptions for consumers."

MoneyWatch.com

Human litter found in Europe's deepest ocean depths

Bottles, plastic bags, fishing nets and other human litter have been found in Europe's deepest ocean depths, according to one of the largest scientific surveys of the seafloor to date.

Published in the Guardian May 16, 2014 by Jessica Aldred

Scientists used video and trawl surveys to take nearly 600 samples from 32 sites in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans and the Mediterranean Sea, from depths of 35 metres to 4.5 kilometres. They found rubbish in every Mediterranean site surveyed, and all the way from the continental shelf of Europe to the mid-Atlantic ridge, around 2000 km from land.

Plastic was the most common type of litter found on the seafloor, accounting for 41%, while rubbish associated with fishing activities (discarded net and fishing lines) made up 34%. Glass, metal, wood, paper and cardboard, clothing, pottery and unidentified materials were also documented.

Jonathan Copley, senior lecturer in marine ecology at the University of Southampton, who did not take part in the study, said: "This very important research confirms what most of us who work in the deep ocean have noticed for quite some time – that human rubbish has got there before us.

"But this paper presents an analysis of the kinds of rubbish, what is common where, and what sort of activities are having the most impact in terms of rubbish reaching the deep ocean in different regions. People are piecing this together on a global scale to appreciate how widespread this problem is potentially."

As more of Europe's deep seafloor is being explored, litter is being revealed as far more widespread than previously thought. While individual studies have used trawling to quantify the amount of litter in particular areas or remotely operated vehicles to study the types of waste, this paper is the first to analyse the patterns of distribution and abundance of litter across different underwater geographical settings and depths.

The most dense accumulations of litter were found in deep underwater canyons, and the lowest density on continental shelves and ocean ridges, according to the international study involving 15 European organisations.

Dr Kerry Howell, associate professor at Plymouth University's Marine Institute, who took part in the study, said: "This survey has shown that human litter is present in all marine habitats, from beaches to the most remote and deepest parts of the oceans. Most of the deep sea remains unexplored by humans and these are our first visits to many of these sites, but we were shocked to find that our rubbish has got there before us."

Litter disposal and accumulation in the marine environment is one of the fastest growing threats the health of the world's oceans, with an estimated 6.4m tonnes of litter entering the oceans each year.

Plastics are by far the most abundant material, introducing toxic chemicals that can be lethal to marine fauna and break down into "microplastics" that have become the most abundant form of solid-waste pollution on Earth. Plastic pollution has also been found to be changing microbial processes in the ocean.

Besides the visible impact of marine pollution, litter can be mistaken as food and ingested by a wide variety of marine organisms. Entanglement in derelict fishing gear – known as "ghost fishing" – is a serious threat to mammals, turtles, birds and corals. Floating litter also facilitates the transfer of alien species to new habitats.

Scientists said one interesting discovery made in the study related to seafloor deposits of clinker – the residue of burnt coal dumped by steam ships from the late 18th century onwards.

Marine biologist Dr Eva Ramirez-Llodra said: "We have known that clinker occurs on the deep-sea bed for some time, but what we found was the accumulation of clinker is closely related with modern shipping routes, indicating that the main shipping corridors have not been altered in the last two centuries."

The report also showed the path that materials such as plastics can take, originating from coastal and land sources and being carried along continental shelves and slopes into deep water.

Dr Veerle Huvenne, seafloor and habitat mapping team leader at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, said: "Submarine canyons form the main connection between shallow coastal waters and the deep sea.

Canyons that are located close to major coastal towns and cities, such as the Lisbon canyon offshore Portugal, or the Blanes canyon offshore Barcelona, can funnel litter straight to water depths of 4500 m or more."

The paper, Marine litter distribution and density in European Seas, from the shelves to deep basins, was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The study was led by the University of the Azores, and is a collaboration between the Mapping the Deep Project led by Plymouth University and the Hermione Project, coordinated by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

This article was shared by our content partner the Guardian. environmentalresearchweb is now a member of the Guardian Environment Network.

About the author

Jessica Aldred is the environment production editor and writes on wildlife and conservation.

World-record breaking swimmer campaigns for ocean life

Published in The Globe and Mail Apr. 22 2014 by Gavin Fisher

Floating plastic cigarette lighters, feminine hygiene debris and old plastic grocery bags are among the flotsam swimmer Benoit Lecomte expects to encounter when he attempts to swim across the Pacific Ocean this fall to raise awareness about the ocean’s garbage patches and their deadly affects on sea life.

Mr. Lecomte, who was born in France and now lives in Texas, was at the Vancouver Aquarium on Tuesday as part of Earth Day at the facility and to promote the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.
Mr. Lecomte was the first person to swim across the Atlantic Ocean without a kickboard.

This fall, he plans to swim across the Pacific Ocean from Tokyo to San Francisco on a five-month mission. The 8,850-kilometre odyssey will take him through the Pacific trash vortex, a collection of chemicals, plastics and other debris trapped by currents in the North Pacific.

Mr. Lecomte, 46, who has been an avid open-water swimmer from a young age, said his concern for the worsening state of the world’s oceans prompted this undertaking.

“From when I used to swim 15, 20 years ago, I can tell there is a big difference. Too often, whenever I swim I have to encounter plastic, pieces of boxes floating around.”

Dr. Peter Ross, director of the ocean pollution research program at the Vancouver Aquarium, said his colleagues on the west coast of Vancouver Island have photographed more than 200 sea lions with packing scraps and fishing nets tangled around their bodies.

Plastic bags are also a threat to B.C.’s endangered leatherback turtles, which confuse the bags for jelly fish.

Dr. Ross said even the small stuff does major damage.

He noted 19 of the 21 albatross species are threatened largely because they consume too many small bits of floating plastic.

The garbage patches in the Pacific where Mr. Lecomte will swim mostly consist of broken-down microparticles and microplastics, which are found in high concentrations in some soaps, toothpastes, facial scrubs and other cosmetics.

These microparticles are consumed by marine life at the bottom of the food chain and then reach up, but more study is needed to understand the full impact.

Microplastics are “possibly a very serious threat to the bottom of the food chain,” Dr. Ross said.

Mr. Lecomte is currently fundraising for his swim. He will follow the same routine as his Atlantic swim, which he completed in 1998 – he will swim for eight hours a day, then eat and sleep on a boat that will accompany him throughout his journey.

“As a father it’s my duty to [raise awareness] for my children,” Mr. Lecomte said.

“I want to tell them that even though I couldn’t do that much, I tried to do what I could do, and to use my passion to make a difference.”

Grads create skateboards out of ocean waste

Posted: 04/23/14 By Lynn Olanoff, The (Easton) Express-Times

EASTON (AP) — Lehigh University graduate David Stover surfed on a regular basis while living in Australia.

He loved the conditions at Manly Beach, his favorite surf spot in suburban Sydney, but hated how polluted the water was with plastic.

It got the mechanical engineering major thinking: Could something be done with the many plastic bags, bottles and fishing nets he saw on a daily basis? His Australian roommate, Ben Kneppers, a Northeastern University graduate, and Kevin Ahearn, a friend from Lehigh, also were interested in the predicament of plastic pollution in oceans.

“We became obsessed with this idea: Why is there plastic everywhere?” said Stover, 28, who grew up in Rhode Island and graduated from Lehigh in 2007.

They started thinking about what the plastic could be recycled into, and their thoughts turned to skateboards, another of their hobbies in addition to surfing. Kneppers soon took a job in Chile and it was there they got the idea to focus on the recycling of nylon fishnets, an especially problematic pollutant in the fishing industry-heavy country.

“It enabled us to recycle these nets into a fun product,” said Ahearn, 28, who grew up on Long Island and also graduated from Lehigh in 2007.

That product is what they call The Minnow, a fish-shaped skateboard whose deck is made entirely of recycled fishing nets. The trio, who call their company Bureo, launched a Kickstarter campaign April 15 and has already raised almost $34,000, well surpassing the $25,000 goal.

Ahearn and Stover shared their company’s story Monday at Lehigh. Students during a 4 p.m. presentation asked a lot of questions, from how they got financing to how their skateboards ride.

Ahearn, who designed The Minnow, said it rides well. They decided to make it wider and sturdier than the average skateboard to appeal to older skateboarders. He said they’re proud of their design, which also includes a lock function not found on many skateboards so it can be chained to bicycle racks.

They received grant financing through both Kneppers’ alma mater and also the Chilean government’s Start-Up Chile program. Because of the latter grant, they had to set up their company in Chile, where Ahearn and Stover have been living for six months.

With the success of their Kickstarter effort, which runs through May 15 and will be used to fund an initial production run, they plan to spend the summer promoting their skateboards in California, where they see the greatest market potential. The boards retail for $135, or $60 for the deck alone.

They plan to keep production in Chile at least for the time being, as the Chilean seas are the source of the fishing nets they use. They hope to expand their company to other oceanside countries, as fishing net pollution is a worldwide problem.

“Fishing is a global industry,” Ahearn said.

Online:
http://bit.ly/1jv6fm5
Information from: The (Easton, Pa.) Express-Times, http://www.lehighvalleylive.com

This Is How Your Plastic Bag Ends Up In Massive Ocean Garbage Patches

Published in the Huffington Post on April 22, 2014 by Alissa Scheller

Ever heard of the Pacific garbage patch? It's one of several swirling trash zones in our oceans, and it's where a lot of our plastic litter ends up. While these debris patches aren't visible piles of floating trash in the water, the reality of what they are and how they got there is just as gross -- and just as harmful to marine life.