Last Friday marked NEMO’s 18th beach cleanup of Jenness Beach in Rye, NH. I’m always impressed by how clean the beach looks when we arrive…and how dirty it really is once you start looking around. We keep tallies of all the trash we pick up to give both qualitative and quantitative measurements to the Blue Ocean Society as part of their larger study. On any given cleanup we may find almost nothing but soggy rope (ocean based trash) and on another we’ll be disgusted by the styrofoam coffee cups and cigarette butts (land based trash). Friday was an exceptionally light trash day, which is exciting since we were expecting to see a good bit of leftovers from the end of the summer crowds. In less than two hours we picked up 50lbs of trash which is about half of what we collected last month. This is the tally based on Blue Ocean’s database categories:
Gloves – 3
Nets (including bate bags) - 10
Traps/pots - 5
Floats/buoys - 4
Fishing line - 13
Rope > 1m - 13
Condoms - 0
Metal beverage cans - 10
Glass beverage bottles - 3
Balloons - 17
Six-pack rings - 1
Straws - 16
Tampon applicators - 4
Syringes - 0
Dog poop unbagged - 1
Dog poop bagged - 3
Plastic bags < 1m - 9
Plastic bags > 1m - 0
Plastic beverage bottles - 12
Plastic food bottles - 2
Plastic bleach bottles - 0
Bottle caps - 31
Motor oil containers - 0
Cigarette butts - 31
Styrofoam cups - 8
Cut straps - 4
Closed straps - 0
Dead animals – 2 (small shark and a crow)
Don't be thrown by the 0's above. We've found at least 1 of everything on the list in past clean ups. In addition to the above data, other points of interest were Kathryn’s find of 5 flip flops – none matching – and a voluptuous blonde wig.
Upcoming beach cleanup dates will be posted on our “NEWS” section on the NEMO homepage if you are interested in joining us.
-Suzanne
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