Last week, CLYNK (along with REVERB, Foulmouthed Brewing, and GrandyOats) hosted the first ever Toast to the Coast beach cleanup event at Willard Beach in South Portland, Maine. Willard Beach is relatively clean, so we didn’t expect our attendees to find much trash, but we were happily surprised to see our environmental warriors going above and beyond to collect even the most elusive bits of discarded refuse. We sifted through the debris and clutter to pick out any recyclable items, and we took some pictures of our… bounty? We don’t really know what to call it.
But hey, take a look at the results of our hard work!
Here’s a fairly comprehensive summary of the trash we collected at Toast to the Coast 2018. There were so many tiny bits of plastic and Styrofoam mixed in with the candy wrappers and plastic junk food bags. We really appreciate how thorough you guys and gals were!
Another adequate synopsis of our findings.
The sheer number of cigarette butts collected from Willard Beach was both impressive and depressing. The filters in many tobacco products like cigarettes are made of numerous tiny plastic pieces, and are not biodegradable. Furthermore, residual tobacco on cigarette butts is toxic to many marine lifeforms. Cigarettes are a major contributor to ocean pollution.
I was wondering where I put this!
Looks like someone threw a mini Mardi Gras on Willard Beach! Don’t ask me how I know this, but Capri Sun makes for a terrible mixer. Plus, Mardi Gras beads create a complicated environmental problem that New Orleans agencies have been attempting to fix for years.
“RECYCLING POLICE.”
Some poor children lost their plastic shovels and a piece of sidewalk chalk. Don’t worry. We’ll make sure they get recycled. Or reused.
A little girl and her father found a whole bucket and a plastic tote on the shore. We’re totes gonna recycle these, for shore.
Here’s one final shot of our trash pile.
It’s hard to convey our sincerity through an indirect, non-personal communication, but we’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to all of our Toast to the Coast attendees.
So, thank you. It’s important that you came.
About halfway between Hawaii and the coast of California, there’s a massive concentration of plastic debris spanning over 600,000 square miles. For perspective, this “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is more than twice the size of Texas. In 2015, humans collectively produced 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste, and only about nine percent of the plastic waste we produce on planet Earth gets recycled. Further, over eight trillion microbeads enter aquatic environments throughout the United States every day.
We didn’t expect to clear 600,000 square miles of trash, nor did we expect our efforts to outright solve a complicating pollution problem, but adopting the right attitude and maintaining a progressive mindset is how big changes begin.
By picking up a few handfuls of garbage, we all made the first step toward curbing plastic pollution in our oceans.
