Let's Make Coastal Cleanups Chronic

In case you missed it, last Saturday was the 25th Annual International Coastal Cleanup, started by the Ocean Conservancy and enacted by hundreds of thousands of volunteer groups and individuals around the world. Imagine swarms of litterbugs combing beaches, sweeping the seafloor on SCUBA, and straining the surface waters from boats, all in an effort to take out from the sea what should never have made its way in.

It was a day of local action to address a global problem that connects all of us—across oceans and species—through a long and littered web.

Just how long and how littered?

Ocean Conservancy's 2010 report states that almost half a million volunteers collected over 7.4 million pounds of trash from 60,00 sites for the 2009 event. The Hawaii Wildlife Fund (HWF) has collected more than 100 tons of debris from a remote stretch of beach along the south coast of the Big Island in the past seven years.

That's the thing about ocean trash: It knows no boundaries. An estimated 60 to 80 percent of marine debris originates on land, but from there, goes wherever the currents carry it: populated beaches, isolated ocean atolls, swirling centers of ocean basins.

In all of those locations and along the way, our garbage can entangle, drown, choke, and poison wildlife.  Just like climate change, the marine debris problem strikes even in those places we've specifically set aside as "protected." And it just keeps on coming. The HWF estimates 10 to 20 tons washes up every year along Hawai'i's south coast alone. It's a weighty problem that demands more than a single day of action. That's easy because there are many ways we can each be part of everyday solutions.

First step is to reduce the amount of trash, especially plastic, that goes into the sea.

As Pamela Black noted in the Animals blog last week, four of the top five most common trash items are all recyclable. Second step is to join in or create your own local beach clean up events on a regular basis. Local events can have a big impact on their local beaches and beyond—for example, HWF now ships tons of derelict fishing nets to Oahu where they are turned into electricity in a trash-to-energy conversion plant. What other solutions can you create?

Photo credit: poolie via Flickr

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