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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 2018
Katie Frankowicz/The Daily Astorian
Small, unidentifiable bits of plastic litter beaches in Clatsop County.
Plastics: ‘There’s nobody that really wants it’
Continued from Page 1A
Sea Turtles Forever and Blue Wave
volunteers collected trash and plastic by
hand on Presidents Day, plucking it from
the grasses and boulders in the estuarine
area on the north side of South Jetty. The
Seaside nonprofits more commonly run
filtration efforts on sandy beaches, using
screens to sift the sand and pull out micro-
plastics — plastic odds and ends so worn
and broken it is often impossible to figure
out their origin or purpose. The shards can
be hazardous to marine animals that mis-
take them for food.
The microplastic volunteers gather
goes to a nonrecyclable solid waste landfill
in McMinnville, said Marc Ward, founder
of Sea Turtles Forever. Almost none of the
material is recyclable and there are con-
cerns about toxic contaminants.
“It’s a little difficult with beach debris,”
said Joy Hawkins, program manager at
SOLVE, an Oregon nonprofit that orga-
nizes cleanups across the state. “ … A lot
of recycling facilities can’t take dirty plas-
tic, or if it’s too sandy or if it’s been out in
the ocean too long it can contaminate the
bales.”
Cigarette butts, plastic bottles and caps,
food wrappers and plastic bags are the
most common litter SOLVE sees in Ore-
gon. Some of these items — even the ciga-
rette butts — can be recycled or upcycled,
turned into something new. SOLVE works
with local haulers to collect and dispose of
plastic and other trash when possible, but
many plastics, especially microplastics,
remain problematic.
“It’s much more difficult than I think
people realize to actually get the plastic to
recycling facilities and have it be able to be
recycled versus just doing what we can to
get it off the beach,” Hawkins said.
Limited options
On many North Coast beaches, a sinu-
ous carpet of microplastics marks the tide
line. A paper published in the journal Sci-
ence in 2015 estimated that as much as
12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste
may have ended up in the ocean in 2010,
while another study predicts that plastic
in the ocean — pound for pound — could
outweigh fish by 2050.
“This issue — marine microplastic — is
far beyond the issue of large debris, much
more complicated and a much greater
threat to our oceans’ survival,” Ward said.
He invented the sand filtration screens his
organization uses. It is a tool that has been
picked up in Cannon Beach, and Ward is
working with parks and organizations out-
side of Oregon to employ his methods.
“All large marine plastic will become
microplastic,” he said, “so it is a worthy
cause to remove the bottles and bags and
other large items, but it is the microplastic
that has the potential to disrupt the entire
marine food web and create an environ-
mental pathway for 200 toxic contami-
nants back to us.”
Richard Arterbury, president of
the Ocean Blue Project, another Ore-
gon-based group, has worked with compa-
nies to recycle rigid plastic, but the plastic
is shipped to East Coast facilities. It’s still
better than having it all go into a landfill,
but Arterbury hopes to establish partner-
ships with local recycling and manufactur-
ing companies.
“The setback in Oregon is there’s
nobody that really wants it,” he said, add-
ing, “I think this plastic should be put back
into the plastic products we keep using and
buying.”
Arterbury hopes hand-held devices the
organization plans to start using to analyze
and identify plastic will make it easier for
them to sort and eventually reuse or recy-
cle what they gather off the beaches they
clean.
Cleaning up
On a sunny March afternoon, Andie
Sterling knelt in the sand not far from
where Sea Turtles Forever and Blue Wave
volunteers worked in February. She held
up a tiny bit of plastic. It was distinct, the
kind of color you get when a man-made
object is roughened and reshaped by the
ocean and the sand, bleached by sun and
salt until it is a perfect warm, orange hue.
She stood, kicked at a tumble of dried
grasses and found a short length of yellow
nylon rope. She had already found a hand-
ful of lighters, but she said she always finds
lighters here. She’s thinking that instead of
throwing them away she should hang onto
them, turn them into a display somehow.
Sterling, an Astoria-based artist and art
teacher, didn’t intend to start cleaning this
area, but has started doing so regularly in
the past few weeks, filling a bag with trash
every time she visits. She plans to pass
some of her finds on to her students to use
in art pieces and will likely use bits of the
nylon rope in her own art.
Like the nonprofits that organize clean-
ups in this area every year, she is happy
knowing the trash isn’t on the beach any-
more, but she struggles with what to do
with it after she’s hauled it home. Her
cleaning barely makes a dent.
“Right now I feel good about what
we’re doing,” she said as she dropped bits
of Styrofoam into a bright green reusable
grocery bag. “Then I get home and I feel
almost angry that now I’m responsible for
finding out what to do with all of these
things.”
Sterling has helped clean up after hur-
ricanes in her native Texas. She remem-
bers many times when she would look up
from the small patch where she was work-
ing and be overwhelmed by the amount of
work still left to do. She would wonder,
“How are we ever going to clean this up?”
“Then,” she said, “you just get back
down to it and clean up your little part.”
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