Science Forward

Last Sunday, I joined a group of students to go survey the shoreline for plastic in addition to collecting the plastics that we found.  I was in the same group as Adiell and VivianE so I was also apart of the 40-60 meter group.  To be as little receptive as possible I will just mention a few things that I noticed.  As Professor Branco did mention, there was a beach cleanup recently and the beach itself is relatively new so there wasn’t as much plastic as I expected there to be after hearing about this ongoing issue.  Although there was as much plastic as I expected, there was still a somewhat significant amount that could be reduced through recycling procedures.  Also, we cleaned up an area of beach that was adjacent to the parking lot, which could mean that since the garbage cans were located in the parking lot the area of beach next to it would be cleaner.  It will be interesting to hear about the experiences of the second group, as they are cleaning up and area farther away from the parking lot.  I would also be curious to see how much plastic accumulated on the area of beach that was cleaned up last week.  If a significant amount of plastic washed ashore, then we would see to some effect the rate at which plastic accumulates on Plumb beach.  As I am writing this, I realized that we as an entire group did not recycle the plastics that we collected.  The bags of our collection were placed in a regular trash bin, which was all that the Plumb beach area had to offer.  Another interesting I saw was an oral hygiene care product and about 4 meters away was the rapper or casing for that product.  It made me wonder about all the whereabouts of all the bottles for all the caps that we found, assuming that they ended up in the ocean together.  Could those bottles ended up in the North Atlantic Gyre?  Could they have washed ashore on the coast of Portugal?  We will never know for certain where they ended up or if they are in the ocean to begin with, but I thought it was interesting to think about.