Visitors sometimes leave stuff behind at Great Lakes beaches. Broken pieces from plastic toys or bits of styrene from coolers can get lost in the sand.
One of the most common pieces of plastic trash found are cigarette butts.
Four years ago, I interviewed people who volunteered through the Alliance for the Great Lakes Adopt-a-Beach program. They were cleaning up trash at Duck Lake State Park. You can find that story here.
Lake Michigan is connected to Duck Lake by a small channel. When the lake gets high, plastic trash is pushed into the lake by wind and waves. Then, when the water recedes, a lot of the plastic gets caught in the vegetation on either side of that connecting channel. A lot of plastic.
I visited the Duck Lake State Park beach again two years ago and did another microplastics story, which included information about recovering plastic as a recyclable resource for a line of outdoor wear.
This year, I went back to Duck Lake once again.
It had been raining earlier in the morning. When I arrived, it was a little cloudy, but there was a nice breeze coming off Lake Michigan.
My plan was to spend an hour picking up trash along the road adjacent to the beach and on the beach itself. I wanted to see if there was a pattern of a lot of cigarette butts on the beach.
I had one small bag for the cigarette butts. I also took a larger garbage bag, because I figured I’d pick up the other trash I found.
I was going to compare this beach with another one in the afternoon, so I decided to limit the time to one hour.
In that time, I picked up 158 cigarette butts.
I had thought I might find 60. I was way off.
An employee at the park told me some people park their cars next to the beach to enjoy the view of Lake Michigan, and then toss their cigarette butts on the ground while they’re there. There’s a bit of irony.
The fibers in those cigarette filters can quickly break down into microplastics, and that’s not good.
“Wildlife can be ingesting it. It can end up in our drinking water source for 40 million people. It’s also just, you know, adding to the litter on the beach itself, of course, having an impact on the enjoyment of the beach, things like that,” said Olivia Reda. She organizes beach cleanups for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
“86% of the pieces that we find in a given season are composed of either partially or fully of plastic. So, cigarette butts, again being part of that problem, you know, breaking down into small pieces, less than five millimeters, end up in the Great Lakes, or they can end up in the Great Lakes,” Reda added.
I interviewed Mary Kosuth, at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis in 2018. She found microplastics in every municipal water supply they checked where cities pull water from the lakes. She also found microplastics in Great Lakes beer, although the amount didn’t necessarily correspond with the water supply. That might be because the grains used in the beer often come in sacks made of woven polypropylene.
She said even if plastic itself is inert, additives or chemicals absorbed from the environment could be harmful to human health.
“We found in marine environments, at least, these plastic particles are very good at absorbing chemicals from the water," Kosuth said. "So things like PCB, DDT, brominated flame retardants, things like these can actually form a coating on the outside of the plastic particles, which means that we would be ingesting higher amounts of that.”
Is that really that much of an issue in the Great Lakes? A study out of the Rochester Institute of Technology estimates 22 million pounds of plastic debris enters the Great Lakes from the U.S. and Canada each year.
My day on the road was not finished. I still had more trash to pick up. My next stop was Ludington State Park an hour away. It’s a much bigger beach and has a lot more visitors.
One of the things that could help is more bins for litter and recycling. That’s what Andrea Densham has found. She’s Senior Policy Advisor for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
She said scolding people who smoke for throwing their cigarette butts on the beach doesn’t help much. She said a different approach is better. For example, signs at the park encouraging people to join together to keep the beach clean are helpful.
“Maybe the best answer is both signage, reminding folks that birds and children enjoy the beaches and that having cigarette butts is really damaging.”
That is, damaging to both the experience at the beach and to the environment.
She said having more trash cans at or near beaches would help.
“There aren’t actually enough in many places, both recycling and litter bins, right by the beaches. And that causes some unnecessary trash, I think.”
Densham said receptacles for cigarettes and cigars are also needed.
Overall, she said all plastic trash is a major problem and society needs to eliminate single-use plastic products as much as possible.
At Ludington State Park, I went to its expansive beach and after wandering around for a while, I only found four cigarette butts. The road to the park runs along the beach for about three miles. There are places to park your car along the way. I found about a half-dozen cigarette butts at each of those places.
I talked to a guy who’d been walking the beach and he said he only saw a couple of cigarette butts along the way. So, not a lot of that kind of trash compared to what I found at Duck Lake State Park earlier in the day.
So, I tracked down the Park Manager, Jim Gallie, and asked him about that.
“At least once per month, we have volunteers that come out to the park and they have segments of the beach that they walk and they pick up litter, they pick up cigarette butts, any debris that they find. Anything that they find that is larger than something they can handle, they report that to us. So, we work closely with the Friends of Ludington State Park on that. And that’s I think at least one reason why our beaches are in pretty good shape.”
Not all the state, county, township, and city beaches have that extra help on a regular basis.
But there are annual cleanups and a Great Lakes-wide effort is coming up.
On September 20, there's an International Coastal Cleanup. The Alliance for the Great Lakes expect thousands of its Adopt-a-Beach volunteers to clear the beaches of trash at sites across the Great Lakes. I imagine that will include tens of thousands of cigarette butts. If you want to help, take latex or nitrile gloves with you. Picking up cigarette butts is kind of nasty. Trust me on that one.
