Ahoy all neighborhood Lake Watchers!

Just in Time for Earth Day 2014

On April 26 at 11 am a beach clean up will commence at the end of Brown Road in Wolcott NY, sponsored by Adventures in the Finger Lakes, Silver Waters Sailing, and Lakeshore Environmental Action. Plastic trash is a pervasive problem throughout the world as we have seen during the search for the missing Malaysian airlines' Boeing 777 . While no one ever sighted the aircraft, they found plenty of debris and trash in one of the most remote parts of the ocean. Some of it was big enough to see from satellites. Here on Lake Ontario plastic trash of various sizes and types is also a problem. In 2012 Dr. Sherri Mason, a chemistry professor at Fredonia State U, sampled several of the Great Lakes for plastic. She found that Erie’s surface had the highest density of any waters surveyed, averaging somewhere around 80,000 particles of microplastic per km². In 2013 volunteers including Lake Shore Environmental Action members sampled Lake Ontario for the first time for her studies with equipment loaned by Dr. Mason (see photo above). And plenty of plastic turned up in our lake too.

The problem with plastic in our drinking water is that the small bits can actually attract insoluble organic molecules through a process called adsorption. These molecules are usually toxic, and if the plastic bit ends up in the gut of a small fish or a waterflea or copepod, they may be taken up by the animal and then passed up the food chain. We now know that very small amounts of plastic can have big impacts on humans by mimicking the action of certain natural hormones in our bodies. The microplastics in Dr. Mason's samples came in part from the 40 plus billion pounds of plastic bottles, bags and other trash that we toss each year. It gets broken up and washed back off the beaches into the lake where it floats around and sometimes gets eaten by birds or fish or zooplankton.

Help us prevent this from happening by doing two things. Recycle and avoid single use plastic material whenever possible and join us at the end of Brown Road. Bring a black and a clear trash bag. We will sort our 'treasures' for recycling as much as possible.