Friday, August 13, 2010

Day 139 - August 13, 2010

life guard tower 26 - Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
1.5 pounds
562.5 total

COMMUNITY COLLECTION COUNT
Day 43
Anna C. - Thank you Anna!
2 pounds
336.8 pounds total
I hadn't noticed that the front of our life guard towers said, "Proudly presented by: deepwaterhorizonresponse.com - Help the Gulf Coast" - made me smile to see this written.

One organization helping the birds affected by the BP oil disaster is the International Bird Rescue Research Center that is now in the Gulf on location, but their home base is "down the beach" in Longbeach CA.

Their founder and director Jay Halcomb won Oceana's Ocean Hero Award this year, and rightly so. On tuesday they released "62 clean, healthy Gulf oil spill birds..." into Atchafalaya State Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is far enough away from the heart of the spill, but will serve as a suitible habitat for the birds. Job well done everyone at the IBRRC!
Meanwhile -- at a press conference for AB 1998 today - Andy Keller of Chico Bag had this to say:


"Have you kicked your bag habit?" - Andy Keller, founder Chico Bag
A person in a lifetime will use 45,000 single use plastic bags. The average American uses 100 a year.....BAG MONSTER BLOG
"Plastic bags are not free. When you go to the store, the cost of the "free" plastic bag is embedded in your grocceries." - Lisa Boyle, Plastic Pollution Coalition

We use 19 billion single use plastic bags in California in one year! Holy S&^%T!!

4 comments:

  1. Sara,

    We love that you're spotlighting the plastic debris issue on our beaches. Thanks for keeping Santa Monica Beach clean for all of us.

    Our organization, International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC) continues to see a high incidence of birds impacted by plastics. Most of these come in the form of aquatic birds up and down the California coastline caught up in discarded fishing line and hooks.

    By the way, in addition to our work on the Gulf oil spill, IBRRC has two bird rescue centers in California. One in San Pedro near the LA Harbor and another in Fairfield, near the San Francisco Bay Area.

    You can learn more about how plastics affect birds here:
    http://www.ibrrc.org/birds_plastics.html

    Good luck,

    Russ @ IBRRC

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  2. Holy smokes! Just discovered you thanks to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute tweet. Love that you're doing this. It's almost exactly the same thing I started a few months ago (on a smaller, weekly scale, granted!). I'm chronicling my finds in southern Maine at http://theflotsamdiaries.blogspot.com. Amazing that some of the sunrises I capture on my beach become the sunset on yours.

    Keep up the great work!

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  3. Thanks Russ for the detailed comment. I will link to the IBRRC's page on how plastic affects birds in my next Daily Ocean post. Think what you do at IBRRC is just awesome. Thanks for writing!

    Sara

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  4. Harry -

    Holy Smokes IS Right!!! going over to the flotsomediaries now. YAY!

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