page_title: Beach cleaning
section_title: Marine debris
hierarchical_section_title: Beach cleaning / Marine debris
caption_attribution_description: There are five major ocean-wide gyres — the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and Indian Ocean gyres. Each is flanked by a strong and narrow “western boundary current,” and a weak and broad “eastern boundary current”.
context_page_description: Beach cleaning or clean-up is the process of removing solid litter, dense chemicals, and organic debris deposited on a beach or coastline by the tide, local visitors, or tourists. Humans pollute beaches with materials such as plastic bottles and bags, plastic straws, fishing gear, cigarette filters, and many other items that often lead to environmental degradation. Every year hundreds of thousands of volunteers comb beaches and coastlines around the world to clean this debris. These materials are also called “marine debris” or "marine pollution" and their quantity has been increasing due to anthropocentric activities.
  There are some major sources of beach debris such as beach users, oceans, sea drifts, and river flow. Many beach users leave their litter behind on the beaches after activities. Also, marine debris or chemicals such as raw oil drift from oceans or seas and accumulate on beaches. Additionally, many rivers bring some cities' trashes to beaches. These pollutants harm marine life and ecology, human health, and coastal tourism. Hartley et al.’s study shows that environmental education is important to eliminate many beach pollutants on beaches and the marine environment.
context_section_description: There are two causes of the degradation of marine ecology and marine debris: the direct forces (population growth, technological development, and economic growth) and proximity forces (land transformation and industrial processes). We can think of the direct forces as underlying causes of why we consume an excessive amount of goods by industry process. The excessive consumption of goods causes marine debris because the goods have been packaged by manufactured cheap non-recycle materials such as plastic. Solid waste plastics cannot decompose easily in nature and their decomposition process takes thousands of years to million years but plastic breaks down into continuously smaller pieces (>5 mm) forming that is called micro-plastics. Thus, such solid waste products are called marine debris that can be seen all through coastlines and on many beaches through the world. There can be many sources of marine debris such as land-based, marine-based, and other anthropocentric activities.
  Million tons of land-based waste products such as plastics, papers, woods, and metals end up in seas, oceans, and beaches through the wind, oceans currents (five major gyres), sewage, runoff, storm-water drains and rivers. Massive amount of marine debris has become a severe menace to the marine environment, aquatic life and humankind. Most land-based sources are illegal dumping, landfills, and petrochemical and other industry disposals. Also, other marine-based sources originate from anthropocentric marine activities that are drifted fishing lines, nets, plastic ropes or other petrochemical products from remote islands or lands, shipping vessels or fishing boats by wind and oceanic currents. Marine debris source is also anthropocentric activities of local populations such as beach goers, tourists and city or town sewage.
  Montesinos et al., (2020) study of the total amount of 16,123 beach litter items to determine the source of marine debris at 40 bathing areas along the coast of Cádiz, Spain. The study displays that the sources of 88.5% of plastics, 67% cigarette butts, and cloth litters are related to the activity of beach-goers and tourists, 5.5% of cotton swabs, wet wipes, sanitary towels, tampons, and condoms are related to wastewater discharges at places close to rivers and tidal creeks mouths. Besides, the sources of 2.1% fishing lines, nets, and 0.6% Styrofoam are related to fishing activities and marine sources. Besides, some marine debris indicates that they are dumped directly by some international ships or by tourists into the sea on the beach from different countries such as hard food container (from Portugal), a bottle cap (Morocco), a cleaner bottle (Turkey), a food wrapper and other items related to navigation (Germany). Montesinos et al.’s study (2020) demonstrate that some marine debris can travel hundreds of kilometers and end up very far from its source because of the ocean and sea currents.
  Also, tropical and subtropical islands are marine pollution hot spots as their relatively vulnerable ecosystems are being severely affected by both local and foreign marine debris. de Scisciolo et al. (2016) study on ten beaches along the leeward and windward coastlines of Aruba that is one of the Lesser Antilles islands located in the Southern Caribbean Sea. They try to determine differences of marine debris in macro (>25 mm), meso-debris (2–25 mm) and micro-debris (<2 mm) densities. The result of their study shows that meso-debris which are rounded plastic products are found on the windward coastlines because the windward coastlines experience higher pressure from distal marine-based debris. Natural factors such as wind and oceanic currents cause the accumulation and distribution of plastic meso-debris to windward coastlines. And, macro-debris that contains a larger proportion of originating from eating, drinking and smoking and recreational activities are found leeward sites of the island because the leeward sites experience higher pressures from local land-based debris such as plastic plates, bottles and plastic straws.
caption: Five major ocean-wide gyres. 25 March 2008.
exif: {}