About:
Every year thousands of volunteers from around the world take one day to gather in an organized fashion to clean coastal sites of invasive synthetic debris and record the data, an event run by the Ocean Conservancy known as the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC). Numbers on their website summarize the impact of last years efforts: 498,818 volunteers picked up 7.4 million pounds of marine debris, in 108 countries and locations around the world and 45 US states and the District of Columbia. September 25, 2010 marked the 25th annual ICC, and promised to be as involved and impactful as previous years.
As an active shoreline collector I was eager to take part in this transcoastal occasion and lend a hand on a local (NYC) cleanup. My intentions were not simply to help delitter a trashed beach, but to see how the cleanups were run, how effective they could be and mostly how my own, often solo, adventures in collecting and examination differed from an organized operation of removal. (To help quantify these aims I created a rating scale to be used in evaluating each cleanup.) I also thought it might act as good motivation to visit new shorelines and discover new synthetic sites. All of which was very possible because NYC was hosting numerous cleanups happening in each of the 5 boroughs, many of which were planned for various days, not just the designated date of September 25th. After a quick glance at the master list (see opposite) I decided to attend as many cleanups as possible to aid in my mission to produce a thorough >LESS review of the NYC ICC. What follows is my own account of each clean-up I did, or attempted to attend and take part in.
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