Getting Up Close and Personal with Ocean Waste

This year for our big summer vacation, my family and I decided to travel down to the Oregon coast and then work our way up through the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. While we were expecting to see beautiful beaches, inspiring viewpoints, and lush rainforest, we weren’t expecting to get up close and personal with carefully curated ocean waste.

But that’s exactly what happened! While in Forks, Washington, we visited John’s Beachcombing Museum which houses about four decades of beachcombing finds from the local area and beyond. John’s towers of reclaimed buoys and floats were eyecatching and the uniqueness of some of the items such as a whole binder of letters in bottles (which he responds to if there is contact information!), a collection of whale bones, and so, so many glass fishing floats were entertaining and beautiful. I highly recommend visiting if you happen to be in the area. It was great for the kids too, definitely one for the fun and frugal activities list!

However the visit did leave me with much food for thought as I contemplated the nature and sheer volume of items that a single family has recovered from several local beaches.

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Nature of the items

In some cases it is possible to observe a contrast between earlier and later-made items, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of materials in that context. For example, beautiful glass fishing floats were used from the early 1900’s through to the 1960’s, but then fell out of favour as more cost effective and efficient plastic-based floats became available.

Consequently, the glass floats, which used to be a relatively common find, are now only found about three times per year. Instead plastic floats emerge from the waves in such quantities that they can be used to create the giant towers shown below. And rather than harmless smoothed beach glass and decomposed natural rope, the remants of plastic foam floats remain in the ocean, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, harming the eco-systems they come into contact with – unless of course they become part of one of John’s fantastic displays!

Interconnectedness

There is an exhibit in the museum dedicated to items recovered from the local beaches as a result of the 2011 tsunami that originated in Japan. Shockingly, there is an entire motorbike in the museum that was reclaimed from the beach! Other items included toys, tires, boots, and other miscellaneous items. John participated in a project where items were identified and returned to owners in Japan, which is such a poignant illustration of how the ocean connects us all.

It also illustrates clearly that what we do in our local areas directly affects the ecosystems around us, as well as our neighbors near and far. In fact, even if those who live nowhere near the ocean still have a big part to play – according to NOAA, approximately 80% of ocean waste in fact originates on land.

The sheer volume of it all

The number of items that John and his family and friends have found and pulled off of their local beaches over the years gives a small and terrifying glimpse into what must be a truly massive amount of items filling our oceans.

Through seeing all of the beachcombed treasures displayed, the scale of the problem became so much more tangible than numbers in a report or pictures on a screen. Being able to see and share space with the items that swirl through the currents of our seas was very impactful and made me even more concerned for the future of marine ecosystems and those that rely on them.

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