By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
On Wednesday, July 3rd, a small group of diehard ODA volunteers met up for our monthly cleanup at the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR).
This is a huge wetland area that is home to several endangered birds. It encompasses almost 2,000 acres of wetlands and is a critical habitat for migrating and local birds.
This expansive land also collects an incredible amount of plastics that are delivered by a network of concrete lined culverts that crisscross the landscape of all of Southern California.
The deeper we look at the effects that plastics have on the human body and the natural world, the more we find how toxic this stuff really is. Recent studies have revealed that microplastics are now found inside our bodies, which is leading to all kinds of cancers as well as disrupting the balance of our hormones. It is also leading to reduced sperm count in men of all ages, just to mention a few of the unintended consequences.
It seems every new scientific study that comes out shows a new revelation about the toxic legacy we are foisting upon ourselves, our descendants, and the myriad life forms that share this planet with us.
While plastics have transformed human society by keeping foods fresher for longer, and allowed the medical field to perform operations and deliver medicines in a way that prevents the spread of diseases and infections, we are just beginning to get a grip on the harm that all these chemicals create.
Most of these studies focus on how these toxins affect humans. But imagine how much more devastating this is on the animals that either live in the oceans or feed on the organisms that live there?
Blue whales are the largest animal to ever inhabit the earth, and as such, need an incredible amount of food each day. Their main prey is krill, which are tiny shrimp like crustaceans. It’s estimated that these whales ingest 10 MILLION pieces of plastic every day! The krill eat the small pieces of plastic, called microplastics, and the whales then eat the krill.
With that massive amount of toxic plastic in their digestive system, you can imagine how deadly that can be for them over their lifetime. If have a healthy life, they can live 80 to 90 years.
From the deep back to the shores.
SBNWR acts as a kind of filtering system in that all the grasses and plants that live there accumulate massive amounts of the plastic before it can reach the oceans. And in this case the ocean is less than a mile away.
Our small army of volunteers is doing all we can to remove the myriad forms of plastics before it can get out into the open ocean. If it gets into the ocean there is very little hope of it ever getting out.
Knowing this, ocean conservation volunteers Dave Merrill, Jean Merrill, Kent Morris, Linda Nicholes, and I grabbed our trash pickers and spent three hours removing bottle caps, food wrappers, water bottles, Styrofoam, straws, cups, and foam bedding. The grossest thing we found was a bundle of six syringes. Some of this plastic stuff is so old and brittle, that even touching a cup will cause it to break into hundreds of pieces…
We’ve been methodically working our way around the perimeter of this section of the wetlands, and it never ceases to amaze that no matter how clean an area looks when we’re done, walk five feet upstream and it looks worse.
There is only so much we can do in three hours. But you can rest assured that we will be back next month to continue this very rewarding work. More trash pulled out of here means fewer animals coming in contact with this pollution. And that means healthier animals living their lives as intended.
All told, we removed about 425 pounds of nothing but plastics. A day well spent!
If you live in Southern California and would like to become a regular wetlands-cleanup volunteer, please email us!
