I took a mid-day walk on a Los Angeles beach yesterday, close to the water's edge where the sand's still wet from higher tide, where sea shells, seaweed and trash wash up to the shore. Better make that trash, seaweed and seashells...in that order. I've done plenty of beach clean-ups in my life, both for organized events as well as unorganized ones. So I'm no stranger to seeing trash on the beach.

But yesterday, I hit the beach with a friend to help console her during a rough patch. Within a couple of minutes of our walk however, I had to apologize for being unable to ignore the trash that lay in our path, so we proceeded to pick up what we could. We didn't have any bags in our hands to collect the trash, so our walk became a series of zig-zags from the water's edge to the trash cans that lay further up on beach. I wasn't sure if my friend was frustrated or happy to be distracted, but I'm sure a zig-zag walk is hardly what she was counting on. I apologized later.

The dominant form of trash was, drum roll please...plastics! No surprise to anyone who has ever stepped foot on a beach. In my approximate one-mile walk (~2 miles round trip), plastic straws and latex balloons were the most prevalent, followed by plastic bags, candy wrappers and bottle caps.

Since the trash was concentrated in the tidal zone, this meant that it had washed up with the tide and was most likely sourced from this and other beaches, fallen off boats, washed down storm drains, and blown in from nearby streets (this is why Heal The Bay's "If you see a piece of trash on the street, pick it up" is one of my favorite action tips, no matter where you live!)

So aside from being an eye-sore, why should marine plastic pollution concern any of us? In brief:

Most plastic floats near the sea surface where some is mistaken for food by birds and fishes. Plastics are carried by currents and can circulate continually in the open sea. Broken, degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton [marine invertebrates that many marine organisms feed on] in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton.

And:

...up to one million seabirds and 100000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic. 

None of this should be news to any of us. But when I went to the supermarket after my walk on the beach and eyed the seafood section, all I could see where little fish bodies filled with plastic pollution. It upset me to know that children and pregnant women would end up eating these things. It doesn't matter how "sustainable" a seafood meal is; when we have a marine area as large as the state of Texas filled with pieces of plastic trash and evidence of plastic pollution in all of our earth's oceans, it's time to reconsider our daily actions:

To Stop Plastic Pollution in the Ocean, Act Locally, Think Globally... (via the Natural Resources Defense Council's Leila Monroe)