Our Daily Ocean: Day 164

With fall in full swing and knowing that warm days won't be around too much longer, this past Sunday, my family and I made a spur of the moment decision to grab some dinner from Lovey's and head to Wrightsville Beach.  Eating a picnic dinner at the beach is one of the best things to do...

When I take dinner to the beach, I come prepared with our own reusable water bottles, to-go ware, and napkins.  And when we're done, I put all of our scraps back into the cooler to take home to compost. I'm big into composting whatever and whenever I can... it's important.  I like to call it giving back to the Earth :)

Through composting is where I first recognized the problematic relationship between plastics and our environment.  Whenever plastics got into my compost bin, they lingered... everything around them would be broken down... while the plastic remained nearly unchanged.  The thing is... nature just doesn't know what to do with plastic.  It's foreign in a system that works so flawlessly...  Our world is filling up with plastic-- landfills packed full, plastic covered beaches, plastic oceans...-- it's obvious that as part of nature... we don't really know what to do with plastic either.  

Well, there is one thing we can do with plastic:  Refuse

(Do what you can when you can... just start because something that has been made to last forever shouldn't be used once or twice and thrown away.)

20 minutes on October 21, 2012 at Access 39

Litter by weight: 11.8 oz
Cigarette butts: 199
Straws: 9
Caps: 12  

Total amount of cigarette butts removed from Wrightsville Beach, NC in 164 days:

51,755