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Beach debris: Stemming the tide of trash
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By Susan Llewelyn Leach

PHOTO: SUSAN LLEWELYN LEACH
Blue Ocean Society staff naturalist Patty Adell (left) notes the items of debris two volunteers have picked up from Jenness State Beach in Rye, New Hampshire.

The list sounds like a cross between a hardware store and a yard sale: refrigerators, portable toilets, step ladders, tires, children's toys, balloons, batteries, light bulbs, fishing lines, crates, clothes, shoes…. There's something for everyone. And it all washed up on a beach in Massachusetts last year.

As summer approaches and beaches get spruced-up, what is found dumped along the shoreline, either by ocean waves or beachgoers, is gaining more visibility, and volume, experts said. Although a fridge might be hard to miss, the bulk of what litters the coast is regular trash that often gets buried in the sand. The biggest offender: cigarette butts, followed by cans, plastics, and rope.

Hoping to stem this tide of trash, grassroots environmental organizations in the Gulf of Maine are working to raise community awareness and change personal behavior. State environmental programs, the federal government, and the United Nations are all pushing for better stewardship of the oceans on the policy and public front.

It's at the local level where much of the hands-on education happens. Jen Kennedy, director of the Blue Ocean Society, a New Hampshire nonprofit that organizes beach cleanups, says it's surprising how often people arrive for a cleanup and comment that the beach looks spotless, only to be shocked two hours later to see hundreds of pounds of trash piled up.

People are key to reducing debris

One Saturday morning in April provided just such a heap. In the space of an hour, 19 adults, eight children and three dogs (who would have liked the trash thrown to them) collected 219 pounds of debris from Jenness State Beach in New Hampshire. One woman came with a wire shopping cart, its large wheels bumping over the uneven expanse as she energetically packed it with weathered rope, plastic bottles, and dog poop.

Two young Cub Scouts, working toward their World Conservation Awards, were particularly enthralled by a dead fish, although a plastic toy soldier retrieved from the sand took a close second. But they understood the significance of the morning's effort: “If the trash goes out [to sea], it will hurt the fish,” explained 8-year-old Trey Rockwell.

It is education and public involvement that will be key to reducing marine debris, experts emphasize, since cleanups are an interminable task, tackling the result, not the cause. Kennedy regularly visits local schools with a 60-foot inflatable whale as part of an education program. It's a way to engage the children, she said, and awaken their inner marine biologist. Trash is not inherently interesting, but animals are. And too often marine animals get ensnared in discarded fishing lines and plastic or they swallow plastic bags that look like jelly fish.

Cleanups are here to stay as long as storms regularly throw up fishing gear onto beaches. The Jenness Beach tally alone included 18 nets, 11 traps, three buoys, 10 pieces of fishing line, and 30 pieces of rope.

Since Blue Ocean started its Adopt-a-Beach Program in 2003 - where volunteers take on monthly cleaning duties for a stretch of beach - it has grown from three sites to 23. The rapid expansion is a combination of factors, Kennedy said: Global warming has pushed the environment into the headlines; companies want to be seen to be doing good; and word of mouth has spread quickly to schools, scout troops, and clubs. The New Hampshire Coastal Program has awarded more than $150,000 to Blue Ocean over the past four years to support the Adopt-A-Beach Program, monthly beach cleanups, and marine debris education.

Cleanup is a stop-gap

International Coastal Cleanup 2006
Data for all sites in New Hampshire

Sites cleaned: 26
Volunteers: 926
Distance cleaned: 24.25 miles (38.8 kms)
Bags filled: 293.5
Pounds collected: 7,254
Kilograms collected: 3,290
Top 10 Items Recorded:
1 Cigarettes 50,549
2 Caps, lids 4,317
3 Food/candy wrappers 4,137
4 Rope 1,846
5 Cups, plates, utensils 1,836
6 Beverage cans 1,473
7 Beverage bottles (plastic) 1,246
8 Bags 1,149
9 Beverage bottles (glass) 905
10 Straws 898
 SOURCE: BLUE OCEAN SOCIETY

While cleaning up serves a purpose, it's a stop-gap and not a solution. Prevention is key. But with sparse data on the sources of marine debris, and the influence of weather, tides, policy, and people, researchers are scrambling to gain a clearer picture. Most current studies offer only an unscientific snapshot of how much trash accumulates along the coastline.

The last major review of marine debris in the Gulf of Maine, completed in 1997 by the Woods Hole Research Consortium, concluded that the data are sketchy and the true social cost of marine debris is not known. It recommended more research to improve understanding of the marine-debris problem.

That's where the Ocean Conservancy hopes to step in. The Washington-based nonprofit, which runs the annual one-day International Coastal Cleanup, recently wound up the only scientific survey done on marine debris along the whole U.S. coastline - a massive, 10-year study

Every 28 days since 1996, volunteers have collected, sorted, and noted all the debris picked up at 130 sites around the United States, including Jenness Beach. In the Gulf of Maine, 12 beaches were tagged to be part of the project known as the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program - two in Massachusetts, four in New Hampshire, and six in Maine. Since it was a U.S. study, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were not included.

Now that the data are in, it's a question of analyzing it and looking for trends, said Seba Shevly, a researcher on contract to the Ocean Conservancy. What's unique about this project, she said, is that it's the first of its kind and has been carried out by volunteers. The volunteers' energy and enthusiasm has been so tremendous that despite the larger project coming to a close, she said, the Ocean Conservancy plans to equip volunteer groups with their own databases, so they can continue the research, using the last 10 years as a baseline.

Finding the sources of debris

As the Ocean Conservancy's large study winds down, several smaller research projects are ramping up. What researchers are trying to identify is how the marine debris got there, where it's coming from, and what the trends in accumulation are.

Jenna Jambeck at the University of New Hampshire is working on new ways to track marine debris - both floating and onshore - using personal digital assistants (PDAs), handheld elec-tronic devices with an integrated global positioning system or GPS feature. PDAs have been used during oil spills and more recently to pinpoint debris from Hurricane Katrina, but this will be the first time the technology is put to work in the Gulf of Maine, said Jambeck. The PDAs will be used during beach cleanups and on whale watch cruises, and the data analyzed as part of a study funded by the NOAA Marine Debris Program, said Jambeck, an assistant professor in the university's environmental research group.

“Debris has the capacity to travel anywhere an ocean current can take it,” she said. That was starkly illustrated by a 1995 report in the Toronto Globe and Mail that said one-third of debris off the western coast of the United Kingdom originated in Canada.

Although the Gulf of Maine is subject to complex currents and tides and little is known of the origins of much of the debris, Jambeck suspects it's largely generated by the United States and Canada. As part of her research, she is surveying the public about marine debris awareness, and will use that data to fine-tune prevention strategies she hopes to develop once the study is further along.

In the meantime, as the weather warms and the Gulf of Maine's 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) of coast brace for the wave of beachgoers, those visitors may find more trash cans, more notices about the hazards of marine debris, and more people quizzing them about their debris knowledge.

Susan Llewelyn Leach is a free-lance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For more information see: http://www.blueoceansociety.org.

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© 2007 The Gulf of Maine Times