In the February ‘10 issue of Sea Kayaker we have an article about the Clakamas River Cleanup, an annual event that gathers hundreds of volunteers to pull trash from the banks and bottom of Oregon’s Clakamas River. In October of 2009, the cleanup hauled in nearly 2 1/2 tons of trash. While the event has picked up a lot of momentum over the 7 years it has been held, the amount of trash gathered in recent years has declined. The Clakamas is getting cleaner.
It is encouraging to see that a local grassroots effort is making headway against what must have seemed at the beginning an overwhelming task. Beginnings are like that, but the three kayakers who created the cleanup decided they would do something.
You don’t have to take on miles of shoreline or pick up tons of trash to have an impact. Quite often little things create big problems. Anything small enough to be mistaken for food and ingested by fish or birds can increase the incidence of disease or mortality among coastal wildlife. Particles of foam, s hreds of plastic sheeting and cigarette butts may not be as much of an eyesore as bald tires and rusty shopping carts, but they are significant problems. Cigarette butts, as I’m sure you have noticed, are everywhere. The filters are not biodegradable and leach toxins into the water.
I took a walk from the warehouse where we store our kayaks, across the parking lot and along the 50-yard strip of sandy beach where we often put in for day trips. I took a plastic bag with me and picked up litter. In less than ten minutes I had gathered a bag full of trash from a beach that, at a glance, looked clean. I collected a foam packing sheet, two electrician’s wire nuts, three bits of expanded polystyrene, over two dozen cigarette butts, and a handful of odd bits of plastic.
My haul, weighed on our postal scale, came to 6.4 ounces. No one would notice any change after my mini clean-up; the beach and the parking lot look pretty much the same. That’s not the perspective to take. After my cleanup there were perhaps 50 things that would go into the trash instead of down some hungry critter’s gullet.
The wildlife that we see from the seat of a kayak is one of the things that make paddling worthwhile. It’s certainly worth the effort to spend a few minutes collecting even small bits of trash. Perhaps you’ve already gotten in the habit of taking a reusable bag with you to the grocery store. Take a bag (and gloves, if you like) with you every time you go kayaking.
If you’re making resolutions for the New Year, make one to leave the beaches and riverbanks cleaner than you find them. It’s an easy resolution to make and an easy one to fulfill.
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