By Sarah Fertsch
Staff Writer
Voodoo dolls drowned in the waves. An entire couch washed up on the sands of Brigantine. A dinosaur from the 1960s. Twenty-thousand plastic bottle caps.
Clean Ocean Action has held spring and fall Beach Sweeps since 1985. Every year, the nonprofit releases a statewide report of what they found – from the all-too-common, to the rarest of the rare. In 2023 more than 8 million pieces of litter were collected from the beaches in New Jersey.
The Roster of the Ridiculous, the oddball list of what’s surfaced from the ocean’s depths, has included these strange stars:
- Full-sized vacuum cleaners
- Pregnancy tests
- Whoopee cushions
- Car engines
- Playground slides
- Barbie doll heads
A metal sign that read, “Danger: High Voltage”
In the early 2000s, a North Jersey beach was plagued with pornographic playing cards washing up one by one, sometimes discovered by children playing in the sand. “It wasn’t even a nude beach!” a bystander joked.
“Weird stuff is actually more normal than you think,” said Lydia Ward, a beach cleanup organizer, told Shore Local News. “We get a lot of vapes washing up.”
Most of Clean Ocean Action’s 2023 report focuses on the 12 most common items that volunteers found during Beach Sweeps.
Plastic bottle caps and lids took top spots as the most abundant items, with 23,788 collected. And, for the first time in 16 years, metal beverage cans returned to the ignominious list with more than 4,000 of them picked up.
On a positive note, 2023 marked the first time since 2015 that plastic didn’t make up 80 percent or more of what was collected. But, it still accounted for 71.13 percent of items found.
The first page of the report reads: “Year after year, plastic consistently accounts for the highest proportion of collected litter. Plastic in the marine environment breaks apart into smaller and smaller pieces, making it ‘bite size’ for many more species and ages of marine life to consume. This is a human-caused, and thus, human-solvable problem.”
In 2022, Clean Ocean Action reported higher pollution of single-use plastic bags, and that number has dropped significantly in 2023. However, food waste, specifically wrappers, has increased. Also, cigarette butts jumped from 2.77 to 3.15 collected per volunteer at each beach cleanup.
More than 70 percent of pollution is plastic. The nonprofit has been pushing the New Jersey state government to provide more recycling and trash cans along the beaches, and even ban plastic bottles (and caps) on the sand.
“Volunteers showing up is what helps us collect the most debris and get it off our beaches,” said Clean Ocean Action spokesperson Kiana Miranda. “Understanding what happens to the trash and the things we dispose of is a connection moment. It brings it to real life.”
For the full Clean Ocean Action 2023 report, visit their website at www.cleanoceanaction.org.
