International Coastal Cleanup Gets The Drift

More than 2000 volunteers, wearing ospreys on their International Coastal Cleanup T-shirts, combed the state's shoreline for trash and tallied every piece of it.

Plastics and other trash in the aquatic environments may entangle or cause digestive disorders for wildlife.  Marine turtles mistake plastic bags as jellyfish, their predominant food.  Whales become entangled in derelict line and netting, and baleen whales often swallow floating plastics with food items strained through the baleen.  Birds eat cigarette filters and become entangled in various plastics.  Two young ospreys and several cormorants died this year as a result of entanglement with monofilament fishing line which left them dangling from their nests.
Several fish, birds, and a seal were found dead during the cleanup, but none showed evidence of entanglement.  A 3-foot shark found along the shore in Providence appeared to have been struck by a propeller.  

Oddities picked up were a mailbox still containing mail which the Boy Scouts in charge of the Bristol Narrows Beach returned to the nearby house to which the mail was addressed; a 5-gallon drum of guar gum on Common Fence Point; a used pregnancy-test kit in Warren.

Eighty-seven local volunteers managed sites along Rhode Island's river, bay and ocean shores.  The efforts of the 2000 citizen-responders provide data on the materials discarded on the shore and in the water.  Picking up and tallying the trash were college classes from URI, Johnson and Wales, Roger Williams University, Brown University, Wheeler School, Compass School, Bridgham Middle School, as well as groups from Fidelity, Washington Trust, Rhode Island Mobile Sportsfishermen, REI, Bank of America, Sullivan Company, Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, and scout troops.

The 2008 International Coastal Cleanup in RI is sponsored by ABC 6, BJ's, Dunkin' Donuts, Fidelity, GEM Plumbing, National Grid, RI Bridge & Turnpike Authority, Washington Trust, RI Mobile Sportsfishermen.  Audubon Society of Rhode Island organizes the event for the Ocean Conservancy which analyzes and publishes the results of cleanups across the globe which occurred on this day.  This is the 24th year that Audubon has coordinated the event. 

Photo by: Michael Stultz