Cleaning up the Coast

Written by Chris Ingraham Thursday, 29 July 2010 23:13

The catastrophe of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill has already become the largest offshore spill in American history, and it could become the largest oil spill in the history of the world. The largest garbage collection effort? According to the Guinness Book of World Records, look no further than the annual California Coastal Cleanup Day. This year’s reprise of the volunteer event — the 26th since its inception in 1985 — will take place across Bay Area coastlines on September 25.

With the 24-hour news cycle recently intent to alert us about issues affecting the coastal ecology in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s reason to suspect a raised public awareness of the need to save our coasts. But will such raised awareness bode well for this year’s Coastal Cleanup Day in California? Although each is calamitous, oil and garbage pose different problems for our marine life, coasts, and shorelines — and garbage remains the more quiet and un-newsworthy of the two problems. Unfortunately, it’s also the more pervasive and perpetual.

According to a 1997 study on the impact of marine debris, plastic debris alone negatively affects at least 267 species worldwide, including 44 percent of all sea bird species, 43 percent of marine mammal species, and 86 percent of all sea turtle species. These staggering figures are likely to have grown worse since the study released its findings. Glass, metal, and paper also clutter our shorelines, interrupting the habitat of marine wildlife and threatening them with the dangers of entanglement and ingestion. And that’s just the recyclable waste. Millions of pounds of garbage, some of it recyclable, some not, both endanger beach organisms and make our beaches less pleasant for humans. The resultant cost to taxpayers, as our cities try with outmatched resources to keep up the cleanup, is astronomical, particularly given the inadequate results. But of course, the long-term cost to our ocean and planet is worse.

So, once a year, the California Coastal Commission, with the help of various sponsors and contributors, calls a volunteer army to arms. Last year’s Coastal Cleanup Day, on the program’s 25th anniversary, marked an all-time high for volunteer participation — 80,622 registered volunteers — resulting in the removal of nearly 1.4 million pounds of debris from hundreds of locations around the state. The California effort, however, is only one part of a global initiative to tend more carefully to our coasts. The event in California corresponds with the International Coastal Cleanup, which finds volunteers from Bolivia to Bangladesh flocking to the beaches to remove trash and debris from coastlines across the planet. The International Coastal Cleanup is the largest volunteer event dedicated to the marine environment in the world, and last year California accounted for almost 19 percent of the world’s total participants — and nearly 25 percent of the collected debris.

California’s substantial contribution to the global wastebasket on last year’s Cleanup Day can be seen as a testament to the dedication of our volunteers, or as a bleak indication of how dire conditions have become around our coasts. Plastics are particularly pernicious. Each year the United States alone produces approximately 60 billion pounds of plastic pellets, known as nurdles, and ships them to manufacturing facilities to be melted into mercantile plastic goods like forks and bottles. These end products end up on our beaches, too, but the nurdles are the worst. About the size of a coriander seed, there are approximately 25,000 nurdles to the pound, making them easily disseminated to the detriment of marine life. A study conducted in Orange County in 2001 found that nurdles are the most common beach contaminant in the region, accounting for an astonishing 98 percent of debris collected in the research.

If these and other plastics don’t end up on beaches, buried at the bottom of the sea, or collected at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a Texas-sized accumulation of garbage, made of mostly plastic, in the North Pacific Gyre — then they end up in the belly of animals, which can be fatal. Believing them to be nutritious, marine animals eat the plastic pellets and gain a false sense of fullness that leads many to die of starvation. In addition to being toxic in its own right, high-density polyethylene plastic is also especially absorbent, and sponges up toxic chemicals such as PCBs and DDT that abound in seawater, making it all the more dangerous to marine life. If efforts like the Coastal Cleanup Day are successful, they will not only heighten awareness of the problems with coastline and shoreline waste, but they will stop a sizeable amount of it from reaching the sea to begin with.

This year’s event on September 25 is a BYO-affair: in this case, Bring Your Own Garbage Bag. Every California county is involved in the effort, whether inland or coastal, and from Del Norte to Imperial. This includes the nine counties of the Bay Area, where the Bay’s many miles of shoreline and surrounding coast makes cleanup especially needed. Interested participants are encouraged to contact a Cleanup Day coordinator for details (see sidebar). Registration numbers and data collection are particularly important to assess the program’s success and, like the census, determine areas of need to help policymakers allocate resources accordingly in the future. The California Coastal Commission, park districts, and other local groups are hoping for a strong turnout — and if beaches could hope, they would too.