MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – For weeks, environmental and community activists have been pushing against a pair of bills in the Florida legislature that would ban local governments from regulating single-use plastics.
It comes as the globe is in the grips of an ever-growing plastic crisis. Right now, an estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enters the ocean each year, and plastic production is expected to quadruple in the next 30 years.
On Wednesday, HB 1641 met a similar fate to its Senate counterpart, SB 1162, and was temporarily postponed in committee.
While the bills have stalled, plastic pollution has not.
Our Local 10 News crew witnessed the impact of that pollution firsthand when they visited Sands Key, a tiny island just north of Elliott Key, joining a team of volunteers from Clean This Beach Up and the National Park Service as part of Biscayne National Park’s Beach Cleanup program.
The teams arrived on the island, determined to pick up all the debris and trash that was smothering this natural gem in the heart of southern Biscayne Bay. But they were unprepared for the giant mess they would find.
“Jesus. Really?” exclaimed Local 10 Environmental Advocate Louis Aguirre as he combed through the mangroves and discovered what essentially looked like a junkyard.
“It’s extremely heartbreaking,” said Clean This Beach Up Founder MJ Algarra. “You don’t know until you come to the spoil islands and you see the amount of debris that washes up.”
From the shoreline to the mangroves, everything was covered in trash.
Bottles, balloons, and buoys, fishing gear and flip-flops, any type of plastic that you could imagine could be found on Sands Key.
“I’ve been doing this for 16 years, and I still every day come out and say that I can’t believe this is what it looks like in a national park,” expressed fishery and wildlife biologist Vanessa McDonough.
The sobering fact is that these islands are only accessible by boat, and are about nine miles off the mainland. This specific clean-up effort took place on the Atlantic side of Sands Key, which is on the opposite side of where most boaters recreate. That means the majority of the debris was washed up on the shore, demonstrating the powerful force of the Gulf Stream.
“It’s just we have a massive global marine trash problem,” explained environmental activist Andrew Otazo. “You find stuff from Cuba, from the Dominican Republic, from Haiti, from Mexico, [and] from all around the world here.”
It’s a global catastrophe that shows no signs of going away.
“Worldwide we’re consuming far too much plastic, single-use plastic,” said Marcus Eriksen. He is the co-founder and research director of the 5 Gyres Institute, an organization that has been documenting the impacts of plastic pollution for the past decade.
“We’re finding that it’s (plastic) in the air we breathe, it’s in the drinking water, the beverages that we drink.”
Recently, the organization published their research that found that there are now over 170 trillion plastic particles floating in the world’s oceans.
“It is a scary number, and yes we are in a crisis mode,” emphasized Eriksen.
And all that plastic needs to go somewhere.
“It’s going to be ingested by some marine life, and they’ll finally settle on the seafloor or somewhere near you,” Eriksen said.
Near you…and inside of you.
A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January revealed that there are nearly 240,000 nanoplastic fragments in the average liter bottle of water – up to 100 times more than previously estimated.
Another study found that 88% of all proteins, including vegetarian meat alternatives, contained microplastics.
Once they are inside your body researchers have found that microplastics can trigger toxic effects, impacting development and your reproductive system
The impacts can already be seen in our wildlife.
“Single-use plastics are a huge problem for marine life, it’s costing sea turtles and other animals their lives,” underscored the manager of The Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys, Bette Zirkelbach. “We had one (sea turtle post-hatchling) here pass away last year, I did the necropsy myself and I counted over 150 pieces of plastic and it had in its belly in its intestines.”
“A lot of people don’t realize that every molecule of plastic ever made unless it was incinerated is still here on this planet,” McDonough explained.
Statistics and reports are one thing, but to see the scale of the problem first-hand was a gut punch for Local 10 crews on the Sands Key cleanup.
“This is where we’re seeing microplastics starting you can pick up a lot of these plastics and they’ll just crumble in your hand,” emphasized Biscayne Beach Cleanup Program Lead Vanessa Walsh.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, as legislators propose laws like the now-stalled HB 1641 and SB 1126.
“We can come out here and make a local difference, which I’m all for…I love doing this,” Otazo said. “But this isn’t going to be solved at a systemic level until we get involved in the policymakers.”
Still, during this cleanup of Sands Key, there is no doubt that a difference was made.
But Eriksen explained that until all of us get serious about reducing our consumption and demand real change, cleanups like this one are the only defense we have.
“Get involved, get involved locally, that’s where it counts,” he said.
In total, the team from Clean This Beach Up and the National Park Service removed 1,521 pounds of trash that day. This came just one week after five volunteers from Indiana University had yielded a similar amount of trash from a cleanup.
Anyone over the age of 16 can volunteer in the Biscayne National Park Beach Cleanup Program. Additional details can be found by visiting their website.
For those who would like to volunteer closer to shore with Clean This Beach Up, a list of upcoming clean-up opportunities can be found on their website.