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.
By: Brett Branco on November 11, 2014 at 2:55 am
Great Elizabeth. I like how you were extrapolating form your tiny clean up area to much larger areas. And you also mention microplastics. If we wanted to look for that, we would have shoveled sand into a sieve (basically a box with window screen as the bottom) and separated out the small plastics larger than 0.25 mm or so.