99 pieces of rope in the seaweed…

NEMO’s traditional beach cleanup garnered two new participants this month. This was the first opportunity for me and Erin to join the NEMO team in making the NH shoreline a little bit cleaner. Going into it, I was skeptical of the difference the six of us would make. And while I carried around an industrial strength trash bag that looked like it could double as a body bag, it didn’t cross my mind it would come close to being filled.

Suffice to say, we ran out of trash bag space. In doing so, we accumulated roughly 145 pounds of refuse that had no business being on a beach. We picked up everything from 16 oz plastic cups to shotgun shells to discarded lobsterman gloves.


I did some quick math and here is the result: >145 lbs in a roughly ¼ mile stretch of beach. NH claims roughly 18 miles of coastline. If we make the assumption that the distribution of trash is more or less uniform along the coast, those 18 miles could be home to 10,440 lbs of trash.

The NH situation alone seems insurmountable, imagine the tonnage that has accumulated along the entire nation’s coastline. If you’re interested in pitching in on any NH coastline cleanups, contact info@blueoceansociety.com. Similarly, if you would like to be informed as to when the NEMO team will be doing a beach cleanup at Jenness Beach, feel free to reach out to any one of us and we’ll keep you in the loop.


-Mateyko