Algalita Marine Research Blog

Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, CA is an extraordinary example of the evolution of our American throwaway culture. This unusual beach was used as the city landfill from 1941-1967, at which point the area was closed by the Water Quality Board and the landfill was relocated. Since household consumer goods were sold mostly in glass and tin (and later, steel) containers until the second half of the century, when plastics slowly entered the disposable packaging scene, what’s left of the landfill is almost exclusively glass remnants (the tin and steel has presumably eroded away). When consumer plastic was introduced to the hardworking and time-pressed families of the 1950s after the end of WWII, the plastics industry experienced an enormous post-war boom in consumer products which benefited from the new techniques developed out of necessity during the war.

Being the garbage archeo-anthropologist I’ve found myself to be, I knew I’d find this place fascinating.

It’s hard to imagine a landfill not filled with plastic, but since household garbage wasn’t dumped here much after 1967, the beach theoretically should be almost plastic-free. However, the area around Glass Beach was used as an automotive and industrial landfill until 1973, and 1967 (when the landfill was restricted to automotive and industrial use) was just around the time when disposable plastics became a mainstay in American households. I wondered if I might find a vestige of the beginnings of our throwaway plastic lifestyle here.

The beach was glimmering at first sight – the beach stones and sand are bejeweled with translucent, amber, green and blue glass worn smooth from the tides. I scooped up big handfuls of these little gemstones of our past, and if I looked hard enough, saw small scraps of tin and steel.

I explored further back against the cliffs, and after a good deal of searching, came back with some larger pieces of tin and steel, a scrap of copper, the unsafe end of a metal safety pin, a pop-top from a soda can, and the following pieces of plastic: four partial bottle caps, one intact bottle cap, one electrical outlet cover, one partial and one intact spark plug, one small wheel-type object, and 12 unidentifiable automotive or industrial plastic pieces. As you can see, the use of plastic for household consumer goods was very limited at this point, and is reflected in what remains of the waste stream history.

Before we left, Stiv and Stephen called me over to the rocky water’s edge with a remarkable discovery: bits and pieces of automotive waste were embedded directly into the rock. Innumerable white plastic spark plugs, copper coils, nuts and bolts had become part of the surrounding natural landscape of the beach.

It felt like we had found the first 20th century fossils.

You can see from this photo how time has corroded (or maintained) the different materials in use at the time. Plastic may wear down, but ultimately does not go away. Glass, made of silica, breaks into pieces and wears into smooth, small pieces. The various metals can oxidize and crumble or bend and break into smaller pieces. All of these materials, however, are inert – meaning not chemically reactive -- except plastic, which even time cannot decay.

Patricks’s Point is in Northern CA on the CA 1. We stopped to camp amongst the redwoods and walked down to the beach at sunset to walk our dog, collect and photograph beach trash. There was almost as much plastic as driftwood -- we gathered so much we weren’t able to carry it all, and ended up with little piles along the shore. Here’s a quick picture of what we amassed in about an hour. Some of the most interesting pieces found were: a toy spinning top from the Seoul, South Korea Olympic games in 1988, a pair of kids’ sunglasses that once were bright blue and missing their lenses, and the bottom half of a toy figurine.

Of what we collected at Patricks’s Point, this is all that our limited storage space in the bus allowed us to bring back. Among the selection is six shotgun shells, three toothbrushes, 14 bottle caps, eight oyster spacers, a paint brush handle, two detergent bottles, a spray paint cap, a lump of melted plastic, a margarine tub and an umbrella handle. Many of these pieces have Japanese characters on them.

It is intriguing to speculate about when and where the detritus washed ashore comes from; along the CA and OR Pacific Coast, we see a lot of South Asian junk, mostly from Japan, China and Korea. There’s no way to tell how long it’s been in the ocean, but we can reference Nikolai Maximenko’s drift buoy data which can approximate transit time across oceans. Some plastic, however, gets trapped in the gyres for a great deal longer than expected – it’s hard to imagine the extent of the plastic journey until we find something like the Korean toy top that’s likely been in the ocean for 22 years.

From the San Francisco Bay heading north along the stunning CA highway 1 on our JUNKbus tour, one of the first places we stopped was a small beach in Bodega Bay quaintly called School House Beach, which had some of the loveliest beach rocks we’d ever seen. On this small beach we collected a coat hanger, a toy horn, a popsicle handle, a flip-flop, a glow-stick, several bottle caps and some unidentifiable chunks of industrial and household plastic.

The 5 Gyres team recently spent a weekend in New York City to share our North Atlantic Gyre findings with visitors to the American Museum.  Leslie Moyer, Stiv Wilson and Marcus Eriksen brought plastic from Albatross bellies, ghost fishing nets, and plenty of plastic from the recent expedition across the Sargasso Sea to show.  

This is what we need to do to build public awareness about the global scope of the problem and begin implementing solutions to stop further harm to our oceans.

The "Flying Dutchman" is the much celebrated high-speed trawl Marcus and Johann - the Stad Amsterdam's boatswain - fashioned at sea, capable of collecting ocean samples at 10 knots, vs. the usual 1.5- 3 knots we generally need to trawl at. Why are we so excited about it? This video says it all.....

The North Atlantic Garbage Patch made it to mainstream audiences in the past two days, via an AP article that has been re-posted across the web and in several print articles, including the San Francisco Chronicle/SF Gate. Anna is quoted as saying "our job now is to let people know that plastic ocean pollution is a global problem — it unfortunately is not confined to a single patch."

Additionally, never-before published photographs appeared as a slide show today on the front page of the Huffington Post. Photos include shots of the Sea Dragon in the North Atlantic Gyre, contents of the manta trawl, crew in action collecting marine debris from the deck of the boat, and a collection of plastic marine debris collected along the expedition.

The 5 Gyres Project will have visited all 5 Gyres soon.  We're collecting samples of plastic pollution from around the world and sharing them with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a partner in the project.  The samples are brought to their lab, where they all the plastic inside is divided into different sizes, colors and types.  The goal is to adequately describe and monitor plastic pollution so that we can find the best solution to the problem.

The Algarve Coast in southern Portugal is known for having some of the best waves and most beautiful beaches in Europe. It can now boast another attraction: some of the most plasticky beaches in the world, thanks to an accumulation zone caused by a system of rotating currents, including the Gulf Stream, which compose the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.

At the tail-end of the 5 Gyres expedition to the North Atlantic to study marine debris, I went on a ten day tour of Southern Portugal to photo-document beaches of the Algarve Coast and collect nurdles for Dr. Takada’s International Pellet Watch Project. The beaches, for all their international bragging rights for good waves and old-world village charm, were astonishingly trashed. The worst offenders? Derelict fishing shwag and 517 bottle caps – and just as many little blue plastic straw-type items that were afterward identified as cotton swab wands.

In total I spent a day and a half collecting trash on Praia do Amado in Carrapateira. To be honest, it was more of a voyeuristic investigation into our calamitous consumptive habits than a beach cleanup; the latter would be a wasted effort. Thanks to the Gulf Stream currents, this stuff just keeps coming back. Much of the trash on the beach was covered in barnacles and sea scum, and I could tell as soon as I picked up a blue plastic fragment or a slime-coated bottle cap that this junk was definitely cruising around the North Atlantic Gyre before landing here.

The local community, although mostly unaware of the enormity of the garbage brigadoon  off their coasts, was receptive when I talked to them about the blight on their beaches. I spoke with a local surf shop owner, Fabrice Walter from Carrapateira Surf Shop, who is interested in helping to organize community beach cleanups. (Surfrider has a chapter in Portugal but unfortunately they aren’t active in this region). While I was beachcombing, a woman walked up to me and said, “I tried to collect seashells and all I got was plastic!” As a matter of fact, she was right. Whether scanning the tide line or sifting through sand on my hands and knees, the most salient feature of this beach, rather than seashells and beach rocks, was utterly craptastic plastic.

Our friends at Team Marine, a group of eco-ambassadors from Santa Monica High School, created this awesome video on the problem of single-use plastics. Team Marine does a great job raising awareness about marine debris and the global energy and climate change crises through different service learning and community outreach projects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AqPQkQfA_s&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bch_MADGK6Q&feature=player_embedded

We're back in LA, after an incredible 3 week voyage across the Indian Ocean aboard the Stad Amsterdam, with scientists, filmmakers, and artists. We've now seen plastic pollution in 3 out of the 5 major subtropical gyres.

We'll be posting videos, photos, and stories over the next few weeks. Meantime, the short version: we found plastic in every one of our trawls, which became increasingly trashed as we approached Mauritius.

We collected 12 samples, and the crew will continue trawling for us on their way to Cape Town, using a high speed trawl he fashioned at sea. We call it the "Flying Dutchman".