| 27 October 2008
Recovering coastlines
Devinee likes to assist her grandpa in beach cleanup
A head high northerly ground swell breaks smoothly across the outside reef down the beach. Our eighteen month old, grand daughter, Devinee, with her flaming red hair blowing in the wind, and blue eyes sparkling against the ocean background and all, hands me one last plastic addition to our small pile of plastic and one red mangrove (rhizophora mangle) propagule or seed.
The diversity of our plastic pile’s sturdy contains is as impressive in shapes, sizes and colors, and usefulness -none- as its longevity. These small pieces of red, green, white, and blue trash will be here well past Devinee’s stay on this planet.
I doubt seriously there are any of us who wouldn't like to see an end to the plastics floating in our oceans and washing up on our beaches.
Up to eighty percent of marine debris overall and up to ninety percent of floating debris is plastic. Furthermore, eighty percent of marine debris is estimated to be land-sourced, mostly from urban runoff. These marine debris ride ocean currents that can take it across the globe, as evidenced by the beach debris on the world’s most remote beaches.
According to the United Nations Environment Program there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean. This is ingested by marine mammals, sea turtles, marine birds, fish and other critters at an increasingly alarming rates killing countless numbers of these animals each year.
The sad truth is the world's oceans are being filled with plastic materials that take hundreds to thousands of years to decompose.
As plastic is broken down by the sun it joins the great mass of plastic particles in our oceans that in at least one area outweighs plankton, (the foundation of the ocean food web that consists of drifting microscopic animals, plants, archaea, or bacteria), by a factor of 47.
Also, due to their chemical composition plastic particles collect toxins on their surface which can harm the reproductive health of animals that consume them.
Furthermore, marine debris is a drag on local governments, which are mandated to clean it up. For example in California, this problem is especially great in areas that have been deemed US EPA impaired waterways, and thus must meet Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) for trash, such as the Los Angeles River. Southern California cities alone have spent hundreds of millions on meeting TMDL requirements, and the cleanup costs of marine debris as a whole may well push the $1 billion mark, according to the California Ocean Protection Council.
The solution is clear: Our state needs to reduce the amount of high-litter-propensity plastic items it produces and put an economic value on what high-litter-propensity items remain so they can be recovered for recycling. We also need to ensure plastics are free of toxins.
This is a global problem which will only grow worse if action is not taken at both global and local levels. We can start by supporting community beach clean up programs. We must also be sure our political leaders are educated on the severely of this problem.
We can also act at a more personal level by carrying plastic trash from the beach whenever we go there to enjoy Mother Nature’s greatness.
Personally I look forward to Devinee enjoying many of the wonderful rewards our family has received from Mother Nature, and perhaps one day in her lifetime she can look back and say, “We took care of that plastic problem a piece at a time.”
Rodney Smith is the Publisher of
Coastal Angler Magazine
(http://www.coastalanglermagazine.com)
