Thursday, September 16, 2010

Day 154 - Sept. 15, 2010


lifeguard tower just north of the Santa Monica Pier - Santa Monica, CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
1.6 pounds
625.4 pounds total
Mark Armen on left

COMMUNITY COUNT COLLECTION
Thank you to - Mark Armen of Gulpable and The Bait Tank & Jon Frank from Oceana
Day 52
Santa Monica CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
3.2 pounds
372.2 pounds total

Jon Frank & Heather who volunteered at the Oceana table for the Nautica Triathlon

Mark and Jon competed in the triathlon in Malibu this past weekend hosted by Nautica. They joined me last night for a sunset stroll on the beach just north of the Santa Monica Pier to see what we could collect from the sand.

Mark said as we were collecting, "It's all cigarette butts, and plastic bottle tops."
We did find plenty of them. I've been weighing items of trash that I find most frequently to provide some perspective of just how many cigarette butts, and plastic bottle tops equal 4.8 pounds (last night's combined total).
Read on to see the conversions.

An empty plastic water bottle weighs approx. = .51 ounces
A cigarette butt = .01 ounces
A plastic bottle top = .08 ounces

4 lbs. = 126 plastic bottles OR 6,400 cigarette butts OR 800 plastic bottle tops....
Mark is saving fish, and Sharks while cleaning up the streets and beaches with his super cool Bait Tank cigarette depository. Soon you will be able to see them along the Santa Monica pier, and next the world! Sounds funny, but the entire world does seem to have a cigarette butt liter problem that could use Mark's Bait Tanks.
I will never forget watching a local sea gull gulp down a cigarette lighter in front of me. I tried to scare it off to take it away, but instead I succeeded in only making it swallow it down faster so that it wouldn't loose its catch. It was such a bummer.

2 comments:

  1. Hey! That butt's not supposed to be there!! :( I suppose that it's still better than what I've been finding...

    Of course, I can't even imagine watching a seagull down a lighter... my heart would sink.

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  2. Doll, the otherday I went snorkeling in a place called "The Blue Lagoon" in the southeast coast of Bali. I spent the entire swim, as we did in Tulum picking pieces of plastic out of the water. When I swam to shore there was a bank of plastic trash, that I knew would simply wash into the ocean next rain. The plastic problem here is unimaginable, and so visible. I thought, if you came to weigh trash here, it would blow the SM counts out of the water. Miss you.
    T

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