How the Trash in Appalachia Affects the Oceans

Perhaps you've heard of the "gyre" of plastic floating around in the Pacific Ocean.  I'd heard of it, and I envisioned a sort of solid-looking mass of water bottles and milk jugs, and I thought, "Why don't people with big boats go out there and start picking it all up?"  I even thought of suggesting that to the Sea Shepherd Society, now that they finally managed to stop Japanese whaling (Yay!!!). 

The very night I mentioned that to my husband, he called me in to see a show on TV about just that.  It was a documentary called Bag It.  It explained that there is not just one gyre, but five, where ocean currents come together: one in the North Pacific, one in the South Pacific, one in the North Atlantic, one in the South Atlantic, and I think the other one was in the Indian Ocean.   The one in the North Pacific is estimated to be somewhere between the size of Texas and the whole United States.  And--here's the even worse part--the plastic breaks down from the sunlight into little tiny bits that float beneath the surface. 

Bag It also showed how whole colonies of sea birds are dying from eating plastic, not to mention endangered sea turtles.  They showed the contents of the stomachs of dead ones--full of plastic.  Think about how the ocean is supposed to be to these animals.  Everything in sight is edible, if you can catch it.  Sea turtles love eating jelly fish, and often mistake plastic bags floating in the water for them.  I've got to see Bag It again, but I think they said something like 90% of marine animals have died!!!  It's horrible!

So how does all that plastic get into the ocean?  Down our rivers and along our shores.  So we here in the headwaters of the Potomac River, the Casselman River, the Youghiogheny River, the Cheat River, the Monongahela River, the Ohio River, the Chesapeake Bay, part of it starts with us. 

And if the marine animals are eating the little bits of plastic, no doubt the land animals are too.  I've already written about how styrofoam breaks down into little bits.  I've also noticed that the lids of soda cups become brittle very quickly and fall apart when I try to pick them up.

This past Saturday, my husband and I paddled down the Upper Casselman River for nine miles, from Jennings to a mile or so above the Pennsylvania line.  It started as a small creek, only runnable because we'd recently had 5 1/2 inches of rain.  We went behind a brick factory, still in operation, and there were a lot of old yellow bricks tumbled into the stream.  I don't think they're toxic or anything, though.  The main pollution we saw were plastic bags, both floating in the stream and among the debris from the recent flooding.  Plastic shopping bags.  I didn't have any way to collect trash at the time, being in a little kayak.  Fortunately, they became fewer and fewer as we went along, and then there were none from south of Grantsville and for most of the remainder of the trip.  Two exceptions were along the drainage ditch from Rt. 68, where the trash just came tumbling down, and in an eddy near the southwestern base of the old Casselman River Bridge.

If you're reading this and you live near there, please see what you can do about collecting these.

At our take-out spot in Pennsylvania, there was a sign posted on a tree of the litter law!  I was glad to see it, until I realized I was standing on a huge mound of gray sludge, probably illegally dumped by some fracking operation!  And right behind the sign were about 20 bald tires, in amongst the plants and trees.

Note to Garrett Countians:  We need to outlaw plastic shopping bags!  And if you want to help pick up trash, let me know.