week 12 Susan reports on structures, blowing plastic bags, cobalt blue sea glass and mysterious blue shreds

Hi Ginger!

Today, as always, was simply beautiful at the beach. The litter in zone 3 was fairly average in that it was concentrated around Johnnie Mercer's Pier, but not too bad elsewhere. One thing that did surprise me today was that there were fewer aluminum cans than I normally find, and I did not find any glass bottles at all. Today I picked up a total of 1 grocery bag of trash, which consisted of lots of random plastic (freeze pop wrappers, cracker and cookie wrappers, etc) 1 shirt, band aids, 1 disposable diaper, and lots of cigarette butts and plastic bottle caps.

I filled my reusable bag (equivalent to 4 grocery bags) with 1 unopened can of beer, 1 empty beer can, 3 plastic cups, 1 plastic candy container, 10 plastic water/juice/gatorade bottles, 1 pair of women's sandals, and 9 sand toys.

One issue that I ran into today was that there were 2 canopy structures, along with a few towels and chairs near beach access #25. It was actually hard to tell if they had been there overnight, or if they had just been set up that morning. There were some people swimming and surfing in that area, so I elected to leave these things alone and just focus on the things that I knew for sure were trash. And looking for turtle tracks, of course.

The highlight of the day was that I found my first ever piece of cobalt blue sea glass. Woo hoo! It is very pretty. The low of the day happened when I was almost finished walking my zone, and was heading back towards Johnnie Mercer's Pier. It was rather windy at the beach this morning, and as I was walking, a plastic grocery bag went whipping past me in the wind from behind. I considered running to catch it, but it was really on the move, and it's awfully hard to run in dry sand. But as I looked up at it I thought, "It's okay. Surely one of those other people will pick it up." Then I watched as 6 different people walked right past the plastic bag. One girl ignored it and kept walking when it actually blew up against her leg. This left me feeling very discouraged.

Lastly, does anyone know what this mysterious blue plastic litter is? There were shreds of it, some of it very small, scattered all throughout my zone.

Peace,
Susan