Beach Day

The beach in Bayfield is beautiful in its own special way: massive pieces of driftwood scattered on the sand, boulders, waves crashing on shore, beautiful sunsets. We went on a long beach walk Monday, as much to enjoy the scenery as to see what sort of debris we could find on the shores of Lake Huron.

We found lots!

This was our first cleanup on the shores of a Great Lake. Most of our watershed cleanups are focused on local waters — the ones that flow into these lakes. It’s the tributaries that are often more polluted and flush the majority of the microplastics into the Great Lakes. Our work is focused on reducing some of this flow by catching material before it breaks down, and this was our first chance this year to see first hand what does end up in the Lakes.

Based on our beach walk, the Great Lakes do receive a lot of plastics: while climbing over boulders and getting splashed by waves, we retrieved over 10 kg of plastic debris over the span of a few hours. We found everything ranging from massive pieces of Styrofoam, to pool noodles and inflatable lounges, to a tire sidewall, to plastic pots, and of course all the small pieces of plastic that were already well on the way of breaking down.

We also found these googly eyes that seemed to be judging us, as a species.

Once plastics break down in the Great Lakes they have a hard time exiting — that’s why the microplastic concentration in the Great Lakes is greater than what’s measured in the ocean garbage patches. It’s impossible to remove the microplastics once they’re floating in the water column, so the rivers, cities, and beaches are the few places where we can catch these plastics before they break down.

We’ll be here a few more days and we’ll see what else we discover during our beach walks.