Imagine wrestling a sea gull for a piece of plastic. Theresa Torrent-Ellis, who heads Coastweek, the Maine coastal cleanup program, had to. “My children saw him with the plastic in his mouth and were very concerned,” she said. “Once the gull saw that I had interest in it, of course, he was even more interested in it. He thought he had a right to it.”
Scavenging beaches for trash is not usually so dramatic, but now and then coastal cleaner-uppers do come across something wild. Last year, a school group cleaning Scarborough Beach found a stuffed dummy. One lucky group got to go with Capt. Brenda Walker, aboard her schooner, to visit various islands.
The program is open to anyone who wishes to participate. Linda Archambault, of Bristol, took a five-week course for Mid-coast Stewards sponsored by the State Maine Coastal Program. In return, she was obligated to donate a number of hours of community service. Last year Archambault chose to work with seventh graders from the Bristol Consolidated School doing the Coastweek clean-up. A smaller group of six students then did a once-a-month cleanup the rest of the year for a parallel project called the National Marine Debris Study, a five-year program the Ocean Conservancy has contracted to do for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Unlike the Maine Coastal Cleanup, the beaches chosen for the EPA study must be somewhat alike, and collection is done in a specific, scientific way.
Torrent-Ellis said the Maine Coastal Program sent out thousands of student certificates. Each team goes out as a group, collects the debris, counts the number of items found, and puts them on a data sheet for the Ocean Conservancy’s database. “The goal, more than anything,” she said, “is helping to identify the primary sources of marine debris.”
For the Debris Study this year, Archambault and 18 seventh-graders will be cleaning Pemaquid Beach. Working on the study last year “was kind of a big deal at school,” she said. “It gave the kids a really nice feeling to be part of something bigger that was a national study.” Many of the students’ fathers are lobstermen, and a lot of the items found on the beach were fishing-related: lobster bands, trap tags, line and buoys. Archambault said the students made their fathers and other relatives aware of the problem by asking what they do to keep trash out of the ocean.
For the Coastal Cleanup project, volunteers pick up everything, but don’t record everything, Archambault said. The list of objects to be recorded for the Debris Study is smaller and consists of three different groups: land-based trash, such as soda bottles and candy wrappers; ocean-based trash from fishing boats, shipping and cruise vessels; and trash from general sources.
Cigarette filters are always the top item in numbers collected. Just plain litter to humans, sea birds feed them to their young, according to Torrent-Ellis, citing documented evidence of gulls doing this.
Much of the trash is land-based, meaning it washes through the watershed then winds up on the beaches. Last year volunteers picked up plastic food wrappers, plastic beverage bottles and fast-food containers as well as marine-based objects such as buoys and floats. Plastic wrap and even plastic shopping bags floating in the water look like jellyfish, a favorite food of the sea turtle. Birds and fish can become entangled in plastic six-pack rings. “It’s really hard for fish to back out of things,” Torrent-Ellis explained; “fish are always propelling forward. Galley waste from large ships puts big vegetable bags in the water, which trap large fish, so there’s a reason for marine debris to be a concern.”
“You see a lot of balloons in the marine debris,” she continued. “If it’s a balloon bouquet [a bunch of balloons tied together], birds do get trapped in the strings, and the balloons themselves can be ingested.” Then, too, she said, “We encourage people to be very careful of how they dispose of their debris, to use alternatives to throw-away plastic, and I always encourage people to find other options to plastic wrap, especially if they’re going to take food out to a beach. It always blows away.”
Over time there have been some shifts in numbers and types of debris, and some regions report different types of beach trash. Volunteers find more fast food containers in southern Maine, where beaches get more visitor use; downeast volunteers find more bleach and lubricants, such as oil bottles, from commercial boat use. But that’s just Maine. Internationally, according to Tara Stewart, of the Ocean Conservancy, the top ten offenders include cigarette butts and filters (75 percent of all litter collected), bags and food wrappers (13.64 percent), caps and lids (almost 8 percent). The list goes down in descending order to plastic beverage bottles, eating utensils, beverage cans, beverage bottles, straws and stirrers, fast-food containers and fishing nets.
The first Saturday of Coastweek is the primary cleanup day. This year, it fell on Sept. 28; the clean-up ended Oct. 5. Maine had about 134 clean-ups scheduled at various locations. The debris itself, the responsibility of the cleanup coordinator, ended up at local transfer stations. Each coordinator collected completed data sheets and sent them to Augusta, where they are being compiled by the Coastal Program staff. The results will be sent to the Ocean Conservancy to be added to its database.
With three-quarters of the data cards compiled, Christine Kimball, an Americorps volunteer with the Maine Coastal Program, said this year 1,950 volunteers collected 9,770 pounds of trash from about 127 miles of shoreline. “A lot of people said on their cards that they found the coastline cleaner this year, they couldn’t find as much debris as last year,” said Kimball. “It seems like the message is getting out: leave no trace.”
Looking back the 18 years of Coastweek, Torrent-Ellis agreed that overall, Maine’s beaches are cleaner. “One thing that we’re seeing less and less of are large dump sites, she said,” explaining that these are places where people dump large items, such as cars and washing machines, and whole bags of garbage. “Remember,” she said, “we’re not just cleaning the beaches, we’re cleaning the coast, and so [we] do go into some coastal watershed areas.” She mentioned cleaning one huge, eye-catching dumpsite near the Verona Bridge off Bucksport at an old pull-off for Route One, and places around Merrymeeting Bay that needed to be cleaned up because rather than pay for their removal, people had dumped large items by little-used roads.
As for littering Maine’s beaches, Torrent-Ellis noted, “When we have a lot of beach-goers all at once, it’s amazing how it builds up.”