Fanisi – Hunting for Plastic on the Beach

I have titled my piece ‘hunting for plastic…’ because there was a  limited amount of plastic to be found on the beach. It is likely due to the fact that we went to a very upscale private beach where they probably have staff to do clean-up. We also went to the beach in the morning meaning that the beach was not too polluted. Nonetheless we did find quite a number of plastic bottles, along with a variety of other bio-materials described below. 

 

Large Plastic: A lot of the plastic that we found on the beach was water bottles and bottle caps, many of them located either near the sunbeads or closed to the shore. Clearly most of the plastic pollution on the beach was found close to human activity which was saddening because it meant people were not taking responsibility for their waste. Other items that we found similar to plastic bottles were pieces of styrofoam cups/plates, straws and also sunscreen bottle caps.

 

         

 

Interestingly, we did also find some plastic items that were probably washed onto the beach from the ocean like the below ketchup bottle. It seems like the bottle has already started biodegrading because the bottom side of the bottle has started turning into thin plastic fibers. Other washed up items that we found were pieces of rope.

 

Small Plastic: It was much harder to identify smaller pieces of plastic, not only because they are small, but also because there were mixed together with small shells and rocks which blended with the plastic pieces. In the below image there is a patch on mixed sand and where there was a couple of plastic pieces but it is very hard to identify them because they blend so well with the other items.

 

Non-Plastic: We found a lot of other non plastic items. The first class of non-plastic items were bio-materials like seashells and foamy sea-salt. The other class of non-plastic items was wooden and paper trash. Our most surprising find was actually an engraved wooden cupboard frame that washed up on the beach!