Green Corner
Hello! I’m John Ragone, a co-head of Beach Cleanup with senior Issay Matsumoto. You might have seen some of my articles I have written for ESSO. Today, I am writing for the Green Corner, and thus, I will be talking about how Beach Cleanup is sustainable.
The trash that covers beaches is often not the trash of local residents, but rather, the trash of humans potentially several thousand miles away. The oceans are a shared space, a commons, of which we are all global residents. When one pollutes a river upstream, the ecology not only at the site of pollution, but also downstream, is afflicted. We do not pollute as individuals; we pollute as a group. In oceans, currents and swells move trash across the globe, and sometimes the trash ends up at Seabrook Beach.
That is where Beach Cleanup comes in. The first Sunday of every month, Exonians get on a bus with our advisor, Mr. Trafton, and head to Seabrook Beach. There, we meet Ms. Schoene, the coordinator of the cleanups and a fantastic librarian on our campus. Ms. Schoene passes out trash bags for recycling and trash and clipboards for tallying what we pick up. The trash and recycling are properly disposed and the tallied information is sent to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation. The Blue Ocean Society runs cleanups along 13 miles of New Hampshire coastline, recording information on what washes up. Nonetheless, these beach cleanups will not resolve the escalating crisis of plastics that fill the ocean.
When we visit the beach, we find everything from driftwood to lobster cages to fireworks to rubber bands. But we also find small plastic pellets, the size of a freckle or grain of sand. These are known as microbeads, or more colloquially, nurdles. Nurdles are the end result of plastic degradation. Plastic does not decompose, or if it does, it takes many centuries. Besides incineration, there are currently no methods to get rid of plastic. On the blue recycling bins, there are symbols indicating that plastic enters a perpetual circle of life, going from use to recycling to reuse and so on. However, plastics only have so many lifetimes of reuse before they reach a base form, nurdles.
The US dumps over eight trillion of these nurdles into the ocean every day, clogging the gullets of animals and oceans with plastic. No number of beach cleanups can contain our pollutants. But as citizens of the world we can change our behavior. Beach Cleanup cannot save the world, though it can raise the awareness to do so. When you visit a supermarket, bring a reusable bag. Look for items made of organic materials and continue to recycle. Only by acting not as individuals polluting at will, but as a group with the intention of eliminating our plastic use, can we hope to save our oceans. Think about parts of your life that use plastic, and remember that plastic will become the plastic of a beach cleanup, the plastic of your grandchildren and the plastic of the planet. Please recycle and keep it sustainable. Have a great week and I hope to see you at Beach Cleanup’s cleanup and cookout on Oct. 9th!