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
