On a gray Friday morning in Ocean Beach, a young couple on vacation from France exchange bemused glances and whisper quietly to one another as they stretch on the grassy area at the foot of Newport Avenue. Nearby, three well-dressed figures are hunched over the sidewalk collecting cigarette butts next to the “No Smoking” sign while a group of photographers and local TV news crews jostle around them.
“Excuse me for not knowing, but who are you?” the woman asks as the group draws nearer to them.
California’s lieutenant governor, John Garamendi, introduces himself and the other members of his group ” Angela Howe of the Surfrider Foundation and Dan Jacobson of Environment California. Garamendi explains that the trio is here for a press conference about a soon-to-be-released report on marine debris, and at the moment they are in the middle of an impromptu beach cleanup before the press conference begins.
“We are here to make Californians aware of the issue of marine debris so that we will do more to protect our oceans, beaches and the marine environment,” Garamendi tells the couple.
Although Ocean Beach looked particularly clean this past Friday morning, Garamendi, Howe and Jacobson returned from the beach a short time later with a medium-size bag of trash.
“About 4 pounds in 30 minutes,” estimated Jacobson. “Mostly cigarette butts and plastic.”
The vast majority of marine debris comes from land-based sources, and almost all of the floating debris found in the ocean is primarily plastics.
“Eight to ten thousand volunteers come out each year to help clean up San Diego’s beaches. It’s an engaged community,” said Bruce Reznik of the San Diego Coastkeeper organization.
“Of the 100,000 to 200,000 pounds of trash they collect, the vast majority is plastic,” he added.
Plastic debris in the ocean is a big problem because it never really dissolves, said environmentalists. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. The plastics entering the oceans from waterways and coasts may linger for hundreds of years.
The problem is particularly evident in an area of the Pacific Ocean just north of Hawaii where major ocean currents cross, forming a huge, slowly rotating mass of water known as the North Pacific Gyre.
In recent years, the Gyre has become a 10 million-square-mile mass of floating plastic debris “” twice the size of Texas. Ã…nd the problem seems to be growing every year, according to environmentalists.
Marine animals become entangled in large pieces of human debris, and seabirds often mistake the smaller pieces of plastic for food. U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists stationed on the Midway Atoll near the North Pacific Gyre often examine the stomach contents of dead albatross chicks and find mostly bottle lids, cigarette lighters and other indigestible plastic items.
“It’s a double threat to marine life,” said Howe.
The debris fills up marine animals and birds so that they can’t digest any real food and the toxins in the plastic leach out, slowly poisoning them.
“Over a million seabirds, 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish die that way each year,” said Howe.
But that is not all, said Reznik.
“There are potential human impacts, too,” said Reznik. “We haven’t really studied the effect of these toxins entering the system and moving up the food chain.”
One thing that all the groups present on Friday agreed upon is that a good place to start effecting a change is to eliminate some single-use plastic items and especially plastic grocery bags.
California taxpayers pay $25 million a year to collect and landfill plastic bags, according to Garamendi. They are one of the most common items that volunteers at Surfrider beach cleanups find, Howe said.
“Our surfers are out there swimming through them,” she said. “They don’t know whether they’re bags or jellyfish, and neither do the fish.”
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, Malibu and Solana Beach have already imposed some restrictions on single-use plastic bags.
Assembly Bill 2058, which is currently before the Senate Appropriations Committee, would impose a 25-cent fee on each bag, if approved.
“We can do what we can in legislature,” said Assembly Rep. Lori Saldaãa (D-San Diego), who also spoke at the July 25 press conference.
“But what we really need to do is encourage people to change their shopping habits and reuse bags,” she said.
Opponents of the measure said this will affect low-income families the most, and they argue that it takes more energy to produce paper bags than plastic ones.
Although the Ocean Protection Council’s “Marine Debris Report” has not been published yet, the document will make some specific recommendations to the legislature, said Garamendi.
He said the report will seek to prevent and control litter by imposing restrictions on single-use plastic products such as grocery bags.
He said it will also recommend that existing funds be distributed to cities to help clean up litter and it will recommend an overall coordination of efforts across the state.
Garamendi said the report will also make recommendations to impose “take-back” policies that make manufactures responsible for recycling their products at the end of the product’s life cycle.
“Germany is a great example of what can be done and what has been done,” said Garamendi.
He said so-called “environmental producer responsibility” rules there have made producers of plastics, batteries, tires and electronics responsible for such recycling.
“Within four years, Germany went from zero to 15-, 17- even 50-percent recycling of these products in some areas,” Garamendi said.
Garamendi added that while there will likely be some serious opposition from American manufacturers, he likens it to the elimination of pull-tabs on beverage cans in the 1970s. At the time, the beer and soda industries claimed they wouldn’t be able to continue to supply their products in aluminum cans, according to Garamendi.
“But in the end, they found a way, and we are much better off for it today,” he said.
“The time for action is now,” said Jacobson. “It’s not unreasonable for Californians to ask that plastics in our state be recycled and [to keep them] out of our oceans. It’s the greatest treasure that we have, and we can’t let it go to waste because we’re polluting it with plastics.”