Dive Brief:
- About 10,000 volunteers collected trash at more than 50 Los Angeles County sites between Malibu and Compton during Los Angeles County's 26th annual beach cleanup. The event, coordinated by Heal the Bay with the California Coastal Commission and the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, is designed to keep trash out of the ocean.
- Volunteers collected 21,310 pounds of trash. Heal the Bay spokesman Matthew King told the Times that coastal cleanups over the last two decades have collected more than one million pounds of trash in the region.
- Volunteers found the usual trash — chip bags, water bottles, bottle caps, glass — and a wallet containing $100 in cash. But old fishing gear causes the most concern, as monofilament line, nets, poles, toxic lead sinkers, and plastic lures trap and kill marine life.
Dive Insight:
Beach cleanups are enormously helpful in keeping trash out of waterways. Removing marine debris from the oceans is getting a lot of attention, as the effects of the pollution on marine and human life become clear. Animals get caught in the pieces, and some eat the plastics, which can cause death.
Oceanographer and chemist Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation says the chemicals in plastic and other marine debris can potentially cause cancer in humans who eat marine animals.
Therefore in Alaska, crews have cleaned up hundreds of heavy-duty bags filled with marine debris, much of which has likely washed up from the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Last month, three of 30 Mega Expedition boats that have been mapping the location of tons of waste between the West Coast and Hawaii — known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — returned to San Francisco.
And while the best way to keep the oceans clear is for people to stop littering on beaches, others are diving in head first to clean the waters. Boyan Slat, 21, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, announced in May that his system to passively clean up plastic debris from oceans will be deployed in 2016, possibly off the coast of Tsushima, an island between Japan and South Korea.
