Volunteers picked up more than 200 pounds of trash per mile along Melbourne Beach during the 2019 International Coastal Cleanup. Getting big objects off waterways was good, of course, but volunteers were aiming for one of the largest threats to the world’s oceans – tiny pieces of plastic.
“Had a great cleanup,” Curtis Byrd, team captain at Ocean Park said. Byrd is chairman of Melbourne Beach Environment Advisory Board. He’s led International Coastal Cleanup volunteer teams for two decades.
Byrd said 52 volunteers covered four miles of beach around Ocean Park and picked up 900 pounds of trash. Additionally, the Melbourne Beach Volunteer Fire Department showed up.
“Melbourne Beach Volunteer Fire (Department) assisted with over 15 volunteers,” Byrd said in the email. “(They) used their ATV to pick up trash such as a 300-pound fishing net.” That fishing net, given time, was likely to become 300 additional pounds of microplastics in Brevard’s waters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines microplastics as any piece that’s less than 5 millimeters. There are manufactured microplastics used in products such as clothing and unintended microplastics from things such as stray fishing line breaking down over time.
“Lots of very small pieces of plastic was removed from the beach,” Byrd wrote.
Amanda Muzaurieta, events and volunteer coordinator at Keep Brevard Beautiful ,was at press time still getting volunteer and trash counts from the International Coastal Cleanup sites.
She estimated from the numbers she had that more than 1,000 volunteers showed up at 22 sites.
“Around 1,100 people in all of Brevard County,” Muzaurieta said of the Sept. 21 effort.
She said that 13 sites had reported their numbers by press time. Among those 13 sites, “we have about 5,000 pounds of trash,” Muzaurieta said.
That trash included things such as an abandoned boogie board at Nance Park in Indialantic and a car bumper at Barrier Island Sanctuary. But it also included at least 228 cigarette butts just between Indian Harbour Beach and Melbourne Beach sites. Those cigarette butts contribute to the microplastics problem. The majority of filtered cigarettes have cellulose acetate, a synthetic fiber that’s plastic which quickly breaks up in water.
Those volunteers also picked up at least 300 straws, 126 food wrappers
and 967 plastic bottles.
Last year cleanup volunteers throughout the Sunshine State picked up 95,700 cigarette butts. They also picked up almost 40,000 food packages.
“Food packages break up and become microplastics,” Muzaurieta said in an interview before the International Coastal Cleanup.
As food packages tear and deteriorate, they become increasingly smaller pieces.
“It gets harder and harder to remove it from the ocean,” Muzaurieta said.
Muzaurieta explained that Coastal Cleanup volunteers catalog the trash they’re finding, which helps business and government policymakers grasp important environmental issues. “It’s not just a normal cleanup,” she said in the previous interview. “The volunteers get to be citizen scientists that day.”
In the later interview, Muzaurieta added, “not only are they going out there and making a difference locally, but internationally (the data) gets utilized.”
The annual international environmental event has been around since the mid-1980s. An Ocean Conservancy staff member organized the Texas Coastal Cleanup in 1986. The inaugural event got a surprising 2,800 volunteers.
Within three years the event went international and has become the largest all-volunteer ocean cleanup around.
Today the cleanup includes more than 100 nations and every major body of water on the planet.
