Seventeen volunteers collected 13 garbage bags of beach debris – including a discarded section of gillnet and two bags of polypropylene line – during last weekend’s beach cleanup near Battery Point.
Organizer Molly Sturdevant, a retired NOAA fisheries research biologist, said fragments of plastic items made up most of what was collected. Most debris was found in or around berms of tidal debris that build up on the south-facing cove near the point. A smaller amount came from north-facing Kelgaya Bay nearby.
“Most of it was broken up and had been beating around for some time. You couldn’t loosen or disturb the compacted berm without finding more… I was amazed by how much was under the surface,” Sturdevant said. “This exercise has taught me that we’re clearly oblivious of plastic debris under our feet and everywhere around us. Even as a trained observer of details, until I looked for it I didn’t see anything but the large and obvious on my walks.”
Besides a few large items, the plastic included a large amount of hard plastic bits smaller than two inches square, visqueen, styrafoam and the plastic wadding of shotgun shells, Sturdevant said.
The plastic wadding was the single most common item found during Saturday’s cleanup. Gillnetters and hunters interviewed this week said they couldn’t explain the amount of wadding on the beach.
Sturdevant said it’s apparent to her that plastics travel the same path as woody flotsam. “It floats, it blows, it snags… It’s just under the surface of the natural materials that float up the beach. It gets brittle from exposure to sunlight, then breaks into smaller and smaller pieces as the wave energy beats it around.”
A recent Earth Day presentation in Haines focused on the hazards posed by plastic in the marine environment, including to fish and krill that ingest bits of it. Discarded nets can kill fish and some plastic items entangle birds and marine mammals.
Sturdevant hopes the cleanup can become an annual event.