{"id":1191,"date":"2016-11-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2016-10-26T10:03:52","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T14:03:52","slug":"scouts-clean-up-the-beach-but-its-just-the-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/scouts-clean-up-the-beach-but-its-just-the-surface\/","title":{"rendered":"Scouts Clean Up The Beach, But It’s Just Scratching The Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

They could’ve complained that it wasn’t their trash, so why did they have to clean\u00a0it up?<\/em> But they didn’t. They could’ve insisted on playing in the sand\u00a0instead of picking up one cigarette butt after another after another. But they didn’t. They could’ve decided that those cans and bottles were too far into the\u00a0thicket to bother with. But they didn’t.\u00a0The attitudes and dedication of the 30+ girls that hauled away both small and large debris from a local beach last weekend greatly surpassed my expectations.<\/p>\n

Saturday, October 15th was the the county-wide clean-up day<\/a>, organized by Carteret County Big Sweep<\/a>. Big Sweep connects\u00a0volunteer groups with locations and provides clean-up supplies like gloves, trash bags, and more. Back in August, I contacted Dee Smith at Big Sweep \u00a0to organize a clean-up for the Carteret County Girl Scouts. We planned for Radio Island Beach.<\/p>\n

\"radioisland-map\"<\/a>
The Duke Marine Lab is in sight from Radio Island Beach. Source: https:\/\/www.google.com\/maps\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prior to setting out with our gloves and trash bags on Saturday, we split into groups of roughly 5 girls per 1 or 2 adults. Each group toted a clipboard with an Ocean Conservancy marine trash data sheet<\/a>. Our instructions\u00a0were to document and count everything we picked up. I brought the forms back to Dee at Big Sweep this week, and she’ll enter our data into a database. \u00a0Eventually everything\u00a0will be analyzed by the Ocean Conservancy along with other trash data from across\u00a0the country.<\/p>\n

Since the Duke Marine Lab master’s students also had their clean-up at\u00a0Radio Island<\/a> just a few weeks prior, I expected there wouldn’t be too much for the girls to pick up other than what may have washed up during Hurricane Matthew. What I hadn’t accounted for was that the girls, being smaller in size, would dedicate their time to squeezing underneath the forested thickets to discover\u00a0litter piles that were\u00a0like time capsules from the past.<\/p>\n

\"glassbottles\"<\/p>\n

My group of girls started out on the walkway to the beach, picking up dozens of cigarette butts that people had tossed over the railing on their way to or from the water. We made our way onto the sand and took a right. We didn’t get too far because the girls discovered an overgrown access point\u00a0to an even more overgrown area of dense branches and low trees.<\/p>\n

They fearlessly embarked on unearthing bottles and cans that must have been lying there for years or even decades. Uniquely-shaped amber beer bottles, antique-looking Coca Cola bottles, large clear glass\u00a0bottles, and\u00a0soda cans so photodegraded that the yellow-lime colors turned gray with\u00a0holes spotting the aluminum. Many bottles were home to\u00a0thick, slimy green and brown biofilms, exhibiting how\u00a0this\u00a0debris had\u00a0become somewhat integrated with the environment. The bottles kept coming, filling an entire large trash bag, and eventually we had to leave without removing all of them. Other items pulled from the forest included a frisbee, a fully inflated inner tube float, building materials, light bulbs, and other food and drink packaging.<\/p>\n

\"girlscoutcleanup\"<\/p>\n

Our whole team of Girl Scout volunteers collectively removed\u00a0hundreds of pounds of trash and recyclables from the beach area. When we gathered at the end, I\u00a0asked the girls what item they picked up the most. I hoped they would say some single-use item like food packaging so I could capitalize on the opportunity to advocate reusables. But instead they unanimously shouted “beer bottles!” in the same tone kids\u00a0normally reserve\u00a0to shout something like “ice cream!” I hadn’t planned on that response, and the girls’ desensitization to such types of abundant debris was somewhat upsetting. I tallied up the data sheets after the clean-up and the girls indeed were right- we collected approximately 136 glass bottles from Radio Island, second in quantity only to ‘small plastic pieces.’<\/p>\n

\"img_1771\"<\/a>
Throwing recyclables into collection bin at the Solid Waste & Recycling site on Highway 101.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Removing litter is a valuable endeavor, yet in the back of my mind I always think about how the authors of Cradle to Cradle<\/a> feel about it: that we are merely alleviating\u00a0a\u00a0symptom of the\u00a0major design flaws in the way we make things. We are\u00a0administering an ibuprofen when what’s really required is reconstructive surgery.<\/p>\n

Trash clean-ups are\u00a0a much-needed start, but there also needs to be greater efforts dedicated to making products that don’t become “trash” and whose materials flow from cradle to cradle instead of cradle to grave. If such products and practices were commonplace then we wouldn’t\u00a0need to rely as\u00a0much\u00a0on consumers to make ethical\/environmentally-friendly purchasing and disposal decisions, since the decisions would already be made at the manufacturing\u00a0step.<\/p>\n

This week I walked over Grayden Paul drawbridge several times on my way to the marine lab, past areas that another volunteer group cleaned over the weekend. Already there were cans, bottles, plastic bags, and food wrappers\u00a0scattered on the side of the road and where people go fishing.\u00a0Clean-ups and efforts to reduce littering of non-biodegradable trash are parts of the solution, but the way our products are made\u00a0is another huge area that must be addressed by engineers and chemists. If cleaning up trash\u00a0perhaps inspires\u00a0a girl scout\u00a0to\u00a0become a green chemist and help redesign the way we produce things, then clean-ups might\u00a0be\u00a0part of a\u00a0solution to the root of the problem after all.<\/p>\n

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Our team of volunteers collectively removed hundreds of pounds of trash and recyclables from Radio Island Beach during Carteret County’s annual Big Sweep event. While clean-ups are a solution to one of the symptoms of our throw-away society, major changes in the way we design and manufacture products are needed to get to the root of the problem. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":401,"featured_media":1196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6,10,12,24,17,28,19,20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[27],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coasts","category-marine-lab","category-environmental-health","category-events","category-leadership","category-oceans","category-phd","category-student-life","category-students"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/files\/2016\/10\/glassbottles.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3UkTo-jd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/401"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1215,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/1215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nicholas.duke.edu\/fuelforthought\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}