UNENDING TRASH: Can we Adopt a Shoreline like we Adopt a Highway?
By, Heather Mlsna
Photos by, Heather Mlsna
As a 30-year Lake Superior shoreline resident, it’s my habit to wake up early and take my dog for a walk on the beach. This is a privilege I thank the ‘infinite everything’ for every day. This summer, we’ve had an incredible stretch of perfect weather, which is much appreciated as we often have a prolonged cold season while the rest of the country is enjoying the sun.
Before walking out the door to the beach, I make sure I have plenty of bones for my dog and a plastic garbage bag that isn’t a #2 or #4 (you can recycle those).
The treats are essential because my dog, Penny, harbors a distinct fondness for finding snacks on the beach. She enjoys consuming fish, bird, or random creature bones, LOVES everyone’s firepit – she can sniff out every drop of hotdog juice and who knows what else? I use the dog bones as enticement away from all of those things – with only marginal success.
I canvas the beach a mile each way from our home. I try to limit my trash pickup to one direction of my walk because I like to meditate and enjoy the view, but it’s sometimes hard to keep this routine. No matter, I find tending the sand therapeutic and somehow my duty. Having raised four children here, I’m sure we have unintentionally left a garbage footprint of our own.
The items I pick up are sometimes left by the residents who live here. I attribute this to folks thinking they will come down the next day to pick up their messes – and usually they do. But sometimes they don’t and those messes are often distressing. Like the family who innocently leaves diapers, plastic bottles, and cans in their firepit to burn the next time they are all together, or the folks who incinerated something containing several hundred nails.
The majority of the trash I pick up has washed ashore the night before or has been uncovered by the wind blowing the upper layer of sand off of what lies below.
It’s astounding how, in my two-mile stretch of beach, I can return home with a small bread bag of garbage every day. I pick up everything obvious and then hit the not so obvious – small pieces of plastic, of which there are legion, and cigarette butts.
Earlier this spring, my older daughter was visiting and accompanied me on my morning trek. We saw a lot of small, round plastic discs that resembled the kind of stuffing you might find inside of a Beanie Baby™. She picked up a few to take to the environmental organization where she works. Someone there suggested they were wastewater treatment beads, but that didn’t seem right to us as AST beads are part of a larger filtering unit. However, they do look similar to what we were seeing.
On a bike ride last week, a friend of mine, who also lives on this stretch of beach, mentioned these same round plastic beads. Her husband sent them off for scientific study awhile back and got a report explaining that the “beans”, officially “nurdles,” originated in Canada from a toxic waste spill in 2009. Apparently, there were massive cleanup efforts at the time, but I guess they missed some. They are particularly hard to retrieve because of their small size and I have often thought I should try sieving the sand, but that seems extreme. You can find more information about this at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/nipigon-bay-nurdles-microplastics-lake-superior-1.3552360.
I love Lake Superior – don’t we all? I can’t imagine someone living on its shores, or boating on its waters, or picnicking in the sand not loving the beauty and peace it offers. Lake Superior has 2,726 miles of coast and it all needs attention. Perhaps we could start an “adopt a shoreline” program, like Michigan has for its highways?
A brief web search shows there are a number of programs for rivers and lakes that encourage adoption of a beach, shore, or shoreline. In Michigan, we have the Office of the Great Lakes (OGL) which was created by the Michigan Legislature in 1985 under the Great Lakes Protection Act. Their purpose is to protect, restore, and sustain the Great Lakes watershed. The OGL collaborates with partner organizations to support sustainable use of coastal resources, coordinate restoration of severely degraded areas, manage water quality and quantity, prevent aquatic invasive species, and engage in emerging policy issues.
The “Adopt a Shoreline” idea for Lake Superior bears further investigation. Please send me any information you might have on existing programs in Michigan and I will contact the OGL to see what is already in place. I will report back! You can contact me at mamamlsna@gmail.com.
