Friends and neighbors of Seahurst Park helped turn the tide on trash during the recent International Coastal Cleanup event held on Sept. 21, 2024.

Started by the Ocean Conservancy over 35 years ago, the International Coastal cleanup is the largest worldwide volunteer project in service to our oceans.

The City of Burien has sponsored the Environmental Science Center (ESC) to coordinate this beach cleanup each fall since 2015. ESC is a local nonprofit organization offering experiential environmental education programs for all ages at local beaches, streams, forested areas, and school gardens throughout south King County.

“Our goals are to inspire and foster environmental stewardship actions for all program participants, and to offer knowledge and resources for communities to deepen their relationship with their local environment,” organizers said.

Thanks to 40 people, more than 60 pounds of debris was removed from our local ecosystem. Every year this number gets smaller and smaller as our community hosts regular stewardship efforts at this park.

But this means that the vast majority of trash that is found at Seahurst is the size of your hand or smaller which can be the most harmful to our environment. Cleanup crews sorted what they collected and ESC used the Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris tracking app, Clean Swell, to report the individual pieces of marine debris.

Participants removed 2,350 individual pieces of trash from the park during otheur 2-hour cleanup, over 54% of which were less than 2.5 centimeters.

Top categories of trash were:

  • 222 cigarette butts
  • 274 food wrappers
  • 119 drink containers
  • 133 bottle caps
  • 579 plastic/foam pieces smaller than 2.5 centimeters
  • 490 various other waste (paper, metal, etc.)

Many organizations host a branch of this cleanup to contribute data for scientists and community members to use to track what is showing up in their environment. Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is the regional coordinator for cleanups that occur within the Puget Sound basin and develops annual reports on what litter was found, including microplastics. These are plastic fragments and fibers, five millimeters and smaller, that come from the breakdown of larger plastics but also car tires, latex paint and synthetic clothing fibers. These litter forms can absorb toxins and have shown up in the food webs all over the world. 

Microplastics have become a popular topic of conversation the last few years due to their harmful pervasiveness in our ecosystem. Plastic can take hundreds of years to decompose completely and has been found everywhere, including on mountains and in the deepest parts of our ocean. In the meantime, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces with degradation from the sun’s UV rays and movement of water and other natural processes. They become dangerous because these smaller pieces mimic tiny organisms in the food chain and are eaten by small fish, birds, and other animals. As those smaller animals are eaten by larger animals, including humans, they end up in the bodies of top predators. Microplastics provide no nutritional value, leak toxins into tissues, and can get stuck in animal digestive systems causing blockages.

Keeping our ecosystem clean and combating plastic pollution is going to take an array of solutions and community support. It takes us as individuals finding ways to use less plastic, holding corporations to account for their continual usage of it in packaging and products without any disposal plans, and tracking what we are finding to know where to concentrate stewardship and policy solutions. We want to thank everyone who came out for this event to take that step at protecting our local environments and coming together for collective action! ESC could not do what we without our community support!

Photos

Below is a gallery of photos of the event, courtesy Katy Kachmarik from ESC (click arrows or swipe images to view slideshow:

ESC hosts various free, nature-based events throughout the year if you’re looking to get involved or learn more about how you can be a nature hero.

For more information about ESC and its programs please visit EnvScienceCenter.org or call 206-248-4266.

Since 2007, The B-Town Blog is Burien’s multiple award-winning hyperlocal news/events website dedicated to independent journalism.

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