Science Forward

The class has completed the Marine Plastics PSA video assignment, and they are spectacular. See for yourself.

The arts or the sciences? Right-brain or left-brain? Abstract or physical?

The binary questions above are limiting. Yet, this limitation doesn’t ignite rebellion. Rather, the majority of us pledge allegiance to either the arts or sciences and so it goes. This happens at a relatively young age. These questions flare up again during the college application process and through all four years of undergraduate study. Subconsciously, students create neat mental maps of reality by which to organize their peers and those who fall in the blank space between art and science cause our minds to send out an “Error” signal. Even within our own CUNY system, the CUNY BA program remains somewhat of a mystery. Those individuals, whose brains have right and left sides that peacefully coexist, are possibly the best advocates of positive change because they can appeal to both the artist and the scientist. Well-known residents of the gray area between art and science include artists like Chris Jordan, Mindy Barker and Pamela Longobardi. Despite being labeled “artists” these individuals use their artistic projects to raise awareness about man’s detrimental effect on the environment. Their work was displayed eariler this year in an exhibit entitled “Gyre: The Plastic Ocean” at Anchorage Museum.

The most well-known of these artists is Chris Jordan, an American photographer, who has been labeled the “it” artist of the green movement. Earlier this year, we rang in the semester with a close examination and open discussion of photographs from Jordan’s “Midway: Message from the Gyre” collection. The collection featured several photographic images of decaying Midway albatross carcasses with large volumes of plastic lodged in their internal organs. Marine plastic pollution is a recurring them in Jordan’s work. In his “Running the Numbers” collections, Jordan arranges plastic items to create a overall large scale image. One cannot experience the style and depth of Jordan’s work from the images below. Instead, please visit: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#silent-spring.

Gyre, 2009 “Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.” Artist: Chris Jordan

Venus, 2011 ” Depicts 240,000 plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of plastic bags consumed around the world every ten seconds.” Artist: Chris Jordan

Whale, 2011 “Depicts 50,000 plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world’s oceans.” Artist: Chris Jordan

Mandy Barker is a photographer, most famous for her “SOUP” collection. The collection features a series of still photographs of marine debris arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. The images, however, are not meant to visually please but rather to mentally alarm. The idea behind “SOUP” is similar to Chris Jordan’s style. However, the work of both artists evokes different responses to the same environmental issue: marine plastic debris.

“Turtle; Ingredients; plastic turtles that have circled and existed in The North Pacific gyre for 16 years.” Mandy Barker Photography

“Nurdles;
Ingredients: the industrial raw material of plastic, collected from six different beaches.” Mandy Barker Photography

Pam Longobardi is an American artist, who also the founded “The Drifters Project” in 2006. The project’s mission statement (found here: http://driftersproject.net/about) involves Longobardi ” removing thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situating it within the cultural context for examination.” For Longbardi, the materials she finds, specifically plastic, reflect human culture and her installations and artwork ironically, make discarded plastic culture objects once again.

“Bounty, Pilfered” made of plastics, steel armature, drift nets and floats. Artist: Pam Longobardi.

“Gyre: The Plastic Ocean” Exhibit Image Gallery: https://www.anchoragemuseum.org/exhibits/gyre-the-plastic-ocean/image-gallery/

Who doesn’t love TED Talks?! Watch Chris Jordan’s here: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats?language=en

Gyre, 2009: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#gyre

Venus, 2011 : http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#venus

Whale, 2011: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#whale

Mandy Barker Photography – SOUP collection: http://mandy-barker.com/current/soup/

Pam Longobard’s Websitei: http://www.pamlongobardi.com/

Drifters Project: http://driftersproject.net/

We visited Plumb Beach on a chilly Halloween morning to conduct a plastic collection survey. Plumb Beach is located just east of Exit 9 Knapp Street on the Belt Parkway. It is best known as a breeding ground for horseshoe crabs. Litter (mainly street runoff from southern Brooklyn) has been accumulating there for a few years. The beach didn’t look as polluted as I was expecting. I guess when we had first spoken about cleaning up the beach, I had pictured a giant landfill. Professor Branco gave us nylon gloves and garbage bags for the collection and split us up into groups. Each group was given a sectioned off piece of the beach. One person was the data collector. That person was given a data sheet that was organized by type of plastic (bottles, bottle caps, shopping bags, fragments, fishing supplies, etc.). If the recycling code on an item was legible, the person took that down as well. The rest of the group explored the area and picked up any and all visible plastic. That was my job.

Once we began collecting plastic, we actually found a lot more plastic than was expected at first glance. A lot of the plastic we found was little fragments, like styrofoam box fillers and bottle caps. We also found A LOT of cigarette butts, and bottle caps. The weirdest things we found that day were a bottle of body lotion and a dead cat. After we finished the collection, we disposed of the garbage bags filled with plastic into a beach public trash can. Professor Branco then gave us a short tour of the area around the beach and we talked about how the beach was eroding into the highway. It is actually really visible, which was kinda cool. Overall this was a pretty fun way to spend Halloween, and we collected a lot of data.

Photo I took at Plumb Beach

Visiting Plumb Beach on Halloween wasn’t entirely what I expected. First of all, I thought we would find more plastic than we did. Although we found a considerable amount of plastic, I thought it would be more of an issue. Secondly, I expected the act of searching to be less structured. Actively participating in the search pattern was much more efficient. I also, for some reason, expected the plastic we found to contain a recycling number and a label for identification, but most of the pieces were fragments or lacked labels. Overall though, the experience shed light on the amount and obscurity of plastic discarded and washed up on beaches.

We also got some great footage for our video!

My group consisted of Nicole, Julia, and I. Nicole recorded the data while Julia and I scanned the beach for plastic. We got a little extra help because Julia’s brother and mother joined the effort! The most surprising thing that we found was this huge piece of plastic that was eroded and sticking out of the sand. It looked like a piece from a refrigerator or oven. We had to break it up to fit it in our bag. At the end of the day you never realize how many obscure things you see at the beach. And while I go to the beach a lot, I never recognize the huge problem of plastic that is prevalent on many beaches. I guess that is why raising awareness to the issue of plastic is necessary and important!

It was a breezy afternoon on Halloween when I arrived. The sun was high in the sky, with its rays ever so slightly filtered by the translucent spread of the clouds.

I had expected the beach to be a mess; a coastal landscape reflecting a similar disorganization to that of my own room. At a distance, however, it appeared to me that there was hardly any plastic at all. Disregarding the branches and shells strewn across the plane, the beach was neat and seemingly unfazed by the immense disposal of plastics that, according to scientists and media sources, had infested even the quaintest of areas.

Nevertheless, as I had approached the past and future nests of the indigenous horseshoe crabs I noticed that, in fact, the beach was quite littered. The vast array of bottles, cigar tips, and plastic bags had been obfuscated by the sheer volume of the sand and shells, and as Matt, Renee, Jenny and I began to reap our harvest of plastics, the high tide of reality had engulfed our minds.

There was no end.

For every piece of plastic we had collected, we found ten more in its vicinity. After several hours of identification and collection, we were fatigued, cold, hungry, and ready to go home.

We said our goodbyes to one another and to Professor Branco.

I doubt we will say goodbye to the plastics contaminating our planet any time soon.

At the end of the summer, I figured that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to dig my feet into the sand for another whole year. Lucky me, I got a chance to go to Plumb Beach this past Friday to do a plastic survey of the beach.
When I first arrived at the beach I thought I knew exactly what to expect. From the way our class discussion played out, I speculated that we would get to the beach, not notice any plastic, start digging, and then find a mind boggling amount of plastic buried away in the sand. I was wrong.
I immediately noticed several large items washed up on the shore. There were a couple of big bottles, and there was one huge piece of plastic that looked like a car part.
Once we marked off our 20-meter stretch of land and jotted down our GPS coordinates, my team and I began looking for plastics by the water. Much to my dismay, we hardly found anything at first. It was not until we moved a few feet away from the water that we started having our first real finds, and once we made it to the high tide line we were bombarded with plastics. Every step or two that I took I needed to record another piece of plastic that my team found.
One thing that particularly surprised me was the number of cigar tips and smoking paraphernalia that we found. I didn’t think plastic cigar tips were common enough for so many of them to be washed to the shore. Also, we found a startling number of bottle caps (now I see why the albatrosses have such a hard time!).
In my opinion, the coolest two items that we found were a really old bottle of men’s deodorant and an old plastic bag of Doritos that was so old it took us a minute to figure out the brand. This comes to show that plastic really does take a long time to break down.
Overall, I had a great experience at Plumb Beach. I enjoyed getting to spend time seeing first hand what we’ve been talking about in class all semester.

I felt quite lucky after finding out that we were the only class that had had a background discussion pertaining to plastics and their influence on our ecosystems. Not only did it help me be more aware of the importance of the activity that I was about to complete, but it also allowed me to share some information with the people from the other classes.

Once the group was complete, we were given directions as to what to do and which areas of the survey to fill out. Then once we were assigned specific parts of the shoreline, we commenced our job of not only cleaning up the beach and throwing out in the trash any garbage found, but also classifying them and seeking any patterns with any possible brands/companies which plastic materials could be commonly found along the beach.

I want to thank professor Branco and his graduate student for organizing the plastic collection project so well. Everything went smooth and the method of picking up the plastic and analyzing it was definitely efficient and easy to understand.

After about an hour and a half, we had completed our survey which consisted of tallying up the plastic residues found and putting them into categories. We covered over 1000 ft² of the beach and collected more than half of plastic bag worth of plastic along with glass and lots and lots of Styrofoam.

At the end of the activity, it was evident for me that the beach had been built to protect the highway from storms such as Sandy and it saddens me to realize that not only does the beach have to deal with the erosion it undergoes due to natural causes, but also the lack of human care for it. After taking into consideration all of the plastic found by all of the groups, it proved once again that we are an obvious cause of the decaying health of our home, Earth.

Horseshoe crab found while cleaning

I am a native Brooklynite/ was raised in Brooklyn, and yet, I had never heard of Plumb Beach. According to Google Maps, Plumb beach was located right off the Belt Parkway. On Sunday, October 26, 2014, I went to Plumb beach with a group of students in order to survey a strip of the beach for plastics and other pieces of litter. When we split up into groups, I joined the group with Shio, Maria, and two other students from another Macaulay class. We surveyed the 80-100 meter strip of beach, an area of approximately 20 feet  in length and 20 meters in width (to the fence). My group and I walked along the length of our assigned area all together, deciding to go with the idea that “multiple sets of eyes are better than one.” I was responsible for recording data.

At first glance, the beach appeared to be strangely clean. In my mind, I imagined piles of plastics and trash all along the beach. I had thought that we wouldn’t have much trash to fill our provided trash bag. While walking past the other portions of the beach, I saw a strip of small, colorful plastic pieces near the shoreline. However, when I got to the portion of the beach that I was to survey, there was significantly less plastic. This can be attributed to the fact that, as was stated in class, there was a very recent cleanup that probably alleviated the beach of the majority of the litter and there wasn’t enough time in between to allow a larger accumulation of plastics/litter. Furthermore, there was less plastic closer to the ocean than there was at a slightly higher elevation probably because the waves can remove the plastic and litter from the beach and because the vegetation on the higher levels allowed more litter to be stuck to them. Initially, I was expecting solely plastics, like bottles and caps. Of course, I had no idea how we would observe and survey the microscopic plastics that we found in class. My group and I found practically everything, including plastic bottles, caps, utensils, bags, cups, candy and food wrappers, styrofoam, straws, and other materials that were malformed and unidentifiable. Our most surprising finding was a plastic syringe. Our plastic garbage bag ended up being very full, and very heavy.

These plastics were discarded somewhere and had traveled here through the currents of the ocean. When looking at the sheet full of markings and recordings, I realized that, if we found so much litter and plastic in such a small surface area of the beach, AFTER a recent cleanup, I couldn’t imagine the quantity of plastics and trash within the world’s oceans. I believe that there aren’t enough trash cans available along the length of the shore, as they are in, for example, Coney Island, only because its probably more frequented. I am beginning to truly understand the significance of the sheer amount of plastics in the North Atlantic Gyre and the danger that it poses to our environment.

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.

I haven’t  heard about Plumb Beach before this class. However, once I realized that it was right off the belt parkway, I envisioned a beach full of plastic and other garbage lining the shore and sand.

Arriving at the site, I quickly identified numerous plastic bottles on the grass coming into the beach and was ready to see the rest of the plastic on the actual beach area.

We were split up into groups and were given an area of the sand to collect our plastic data. My are was from 40 – 60 meters (20×80 meters in all). We started a few feet away from the water until the gate that separated the beach from the grass and the highway. Originally my group and I walked perpendicular to the shoreline, but then we were told that the plastics from the ocean are parallel to the shore. Due to the different tide patterns, plastics accumulate in certain “hotspots.” This made is easier to make sure that most of the plastics and other garbage was collected and identified.

In class we mainly spoke about the plastic bottles and caps that accumulate by the shore. I was very shocked about some of the items that we found. Some of the categories of the data tally sheet were very strange and I couldn’t imagine that we would find them on the beach- but we did. We found everything on the list except for balloons. There were plenty of bottles and caps, plastic bags, and utensils. We also found personal care products such as makeup and nail polish brushes, a sandal, straws and other random plastic wrappers and toys.

When I really thought about where all this plastic came from, I realized that it wasn’t from people who came to relax at the beach. This plastic ( and there was a lot of it!) came from the ocean,  meaning that somehow theses plastics ended up in the wrong place and polluted the oceans. They could have been in the ocean for months before they wound up on the shore.

It was really interesting to actually go out to the beach and see the plastics for myself. Now, when I read or hear about marine plastics, I will have a better understanding of where the plastics end up and how much plastic there really is in the shore line.