Menu
  • Home
  • Breaking News
  • Feature
    • Arts
    • Astrology
    • Business
    • Community
    • Employment
    • Event Stories
    • From the Pioneer
    • Government
    • Letters to the Editor
    • Non Profit News
    • Obituary
    • Public Safety
    • Podcast Interview Articles
    • Pioneer Pulse Podcast: Politics, Palette, and Planet – the Playlist
  • Weather
  • Guest Column
    • Perspectives
    • Don Backman Photos
    • Ardent Gourmet
    • Kitchen Maven
    • I’ve been thinking
    • Jim Heffernan
    • The Littoral Life
    • Neal Lemery
    • View From Here
    • Virginia Carrell Prowell
    • Words of Wisdom
  • Things to do
    • Calendar
    • Tillamook County Parks
    • Tillamook County Hikes
    • Whale Watching
    • Tillamook County Library
    • SOS Community Calendar
  • About
    • Contribute
    • Advertise
    • Subscribe
    • Opt-out preferences
  • Post Submission Test
  • Search...
Menu

Tiny Plastic, Big Problem: Why Oregon’s Beaches Need Our Help; Upcoming SOLVE Earth Day Cleanups, Other Opportunities

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Editor

By Leanna Coy, FNP

On a sunny Sunday morning in Rockaway Beach, volunteers trickle to a folding table at the Wayside to sign in for a beach cleanup. White plastic bags with the familiar SOLVE logo were handed out along with plastic gloves. The weather was perfect. Not too hot and only a light breeze blowing off the ocean. The volunteers and passers-by were handed pamphlets with information on the growing issue of microplastics. Microplastics are fragments of plastic smaller than 5 mm in length. Trash and large pieces of plastic are easy to identify and pick up. The microplastics prove more challenging. Brightly colored pieces stand out against the sand, but the less obvious small white, tan, or brown pieces can easily be confused for shells or rocks. Driven by the concern for microplastics contaminating our coastlines, a local resident has made it his mission to raise awareness and clean up the sand.

From Sea Turtles to Microplastics

Marc Ward has made it his life’s work to make the world a less toxic place. Born and raised on the Oregon Coast, he organized his first marine debris removal off the beach in 1976 for a high school biology class. Since then, Ward has doggedly worked to remove plastic debris from beaches worldwide. In college, he studied environmental physics, gaining an understanding of the importance of every little species.

While on a trip to Costa Rica, he witnessed a devastating amount of marine plastics piled on the tropical beaches and chose to begin cleaning them up. He formed a group of volunteers that began removing thousands of pounds of plastics and started his organization Sea Turtles Forever in earnest to help save sea turtles in Costa Rica.

During this time, he became aware of the harmful effects the plastics in the ocean were having on sea turtles. This led him to a 10-year research project meticulously logging the debris making landfall on beaches all over the world. The project’s results established a database that logged the garbage floating in the world’s oceans.

 

How Toxic are The Beaches?

Ward’s work on recording ocean garbage led to a collaboration with Tokyo University to collect plastic pellets from sites around the world and analyze them for toxicity. These pellets, called nurdles, were found to be highly contaminated with 150 pollutants and harmful chemicals. Typically, chemicals in the ocean are highly diluted due to the massive amount of water and are generally not a threat. However, plastics absorb the chemicals like sponges as they move through the ocean currents. “Each piece of plastic becomes a toxic pill,” notes Ward. When creatures ingest the nurdles, the chemicals leach out of the plastics into the creatures’ bodies. These same creatures are part of our food chain, passing the toxins on to humans.

Tokyo University also found the chemicals leach out of the plastics into the beach sand. Heat from the sun or warm weather speeds up this process. “If we leave stuff on the beach, we will eventually become contaminated with the chemicals,” says Ward. This concern about exposure to toxins on the beach hit close to home for Ward. In 2006, he was at Cannon Beach with his family, where he saw his first microplastic. “I look over, and my son, who is like one and a half, has a piece of microplastic in his finger, and it’s headed for his mouth. I stopped and told my wife we can’t allow this.”

Volunteers use specially-designed screens to filter out microplastics.

Taking on Oregon’s Beaches

Ward began surveying the densities of microplastics on Oregon beaches, from Long Beach to Port Orford. He created screens that carry a small static charge to filter all the microplastics out of the sand one square meter at a time. The screens can filter plastic particles as small as 50 µm. Ward’s first survey with the filters was at Ecola Beach due to the high-density microplastic landfall there. That first year, they collected 50 grams per square meter of microplastics. Each year, the amount they collected increased exponentially. The numbers disturbed Ward enough that he decided to stop surveying the beaches and start cleaning them.

Expanding the size of his static-charged filters, he created a low-cost tool for two people to filter the toxic microplastics efficiently. With groups of volunteers, he can filter entire beaches. Ward has a team on Oregon beaches filtering five days a week during the summer. Ocean currents and headlands cause large amounts of microplastics to make landfall in the same locations every year. Ward notes Whale Park in Cannon Beach is one of the worst sites for microplastics in Oregon. Before the pandemic, their efforts pulled about 2500 lbs. of microplastics off the beach every year for 13 years. They did not clean the beach in 2020 due to the pandemic. The following year, they removed 5000 lbs. of the debris. “We filter this stuff out, and we make it pristine again. And next year, there is another (landfall),” Ward says. “It’s like a maintenance program. But we just keep going.”

To prevent the collected material from re-entering the ocean and washing up on the beach again, the debris is taken to a non-recyclable solid waste landfill. Ward says he would prefer to see the debris incinerated, but it is just too expensive to transport that much debris.

Back at the Rockaway Beach cleanup, one group of volunteers takes a break and compares their trash hauls. Socks, a whole pineapple, broken pieces of plastic beach toys, plastic dog poop bags, a golf ball, a tennis ball, and a butter knife were the larger items found. Most of the debris consisted of smaller items: cigarette butts, a lot of exploded firework pieces, and many unidentifiable microplastics. “I feel bad we can’t get more of the microplastics,” one volunteer lamented. “They are everywhere.”

There are many ways you can get involved. Ward says the number one thing people can do to reduce microplastics on the beaches is to use static-charged filtration screens. You can visit the Sea Turtles Forever website to join their Blue Wave response team or purchase a screen to do your own sand sifting for microplastics. This month, SOLVE is sponsoring its annual Oregon Spring Cleanup, which will be held from April 13 to 22. They also have events throughout the year. Visit their website to register for one of their events.

Featured Video

  • Advertise Here
Contribute SUBSCRIBE

Tillamook Weather

Tides

Tillamook County Pioneer Podcast Series

Tillamook Church Search

Cloverdale Baptist Church
Nestucca Valley Presbyterian
Tillamook Ecumenical Service

Archives

  • Home
  • EULA Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Opt-out preferences
  • Search...
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on pinterest
Pinterest
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
Linkedin
Catherine

Recent Posts

  • Grove avenue closed in Tillamook for maintenance

    May 10, 2025
  • Astoria Farmers Market new, outdoor location with parking, with great Riverwalk access

    May 10, 2025
  • WORDS OF WISDOM: Boycotts and Protests in our Community Garden

    May 9, 2025
©2025 | Theme by SuperbThemes
Menu
  • Home
  • Breaking News
  • Feature
    • Arts
    • Astrology
    • Business
    • Community
    • Employment
    • Event Stories
    • From the Pioneer
    • Government
    • Letters to the Editor
    • Non Profit News
    • Obituary
    • Public Safety
    • Podcast Interview Articles
    • Pioneer Pulse Podcast: Politics, Palette, and Planet – the Playlist
  • Weather
  • Guest Column
    • Perspectives
    • Don Backman Photos
    • Ardent Gourmet
    • Kitchen Maven
    • I’ve been thinking
    • Jim Heffernan
    • The Littoral Life
    • Neal Lemery
    • View From Here
    • Virginia Carrell Prowell
    • Words of Wisdom
  • Things to do
    • Calendar
    • Tillamook County Parks
    • Tillamook County Hikes
    • Whale Watching
    • Tillamook County Library
    • SOS Community Calendar
  • About
    • Contribute
    • Advertise
    • Subscribe
    • Opt-out preferences
  • Post Submission Test
  • Search...

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}