 We're going to get started here, so if everybody could please take a seat. Everyone please. This wonderful group that was still on time this morning, we're 15 minutes behind now this afternoon, so we're going to work our best to get back to where we need to be so you don't stay here till 5.30, but we might keep you till 5.30, so stay on time. So I am going to introduce the moderator of our next panel, Reed Porter. Reed is our staff attorney at the Marine Affairs Institute where he directs the law fellow program. And then I'm going to hand it off to Reed and he will introduce the rest of the speakers and you will hear from a wonderful array of different projects throughout New England. So Reed joined us a little under a year ago and I'm so pleased that he's here. Prior to coming to the Marine Affairs Institute, he was a senior attorney and directed the invasive species program at the Environmental Law Institute down in Washington, D.C. He also served as a judicial clerk for the Honorable Julia Smith Gibbons of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Memphis, Tennessee. And he has extensive experience in a wide range of ocean and coastal law and policy topics including fisheries and aquaculture, compliance and enforcement, marine protected areas, offshore energy, invasive species and other topics, many other topics, which he works on with our law fellows. Reed has his JD from Harvard Law School where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Environmental Law Review and a BA in Geology from Amherst College. Thank you, Reed. I think I nearly got promoted to editor of the Harvard Law Review, which would have been pretty nice actually, but we'll leave that to President Obama. Thank you all for coming back after lunch. I know that you're probably a little bit sleepy, so we're going to have a really exciting panel for you today. We've got five great panelists who are going to speak about different marine debris issues that are actually happening around New England. The format for this panel is that each of them is going to give a presentation and we're going to save question and answer for the end. So write down those questions as the panelists go along and save them. We will get to them eventually. The way we designed this panel is to represent some of the highlights of activities that are happening in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Apologies to Maine who weren't able to be here for it. This broad geographic scope allows us to learn from our friends and neighbors to identify best practices, lessons learned and challenges that need to be overcome. The second important goal for the panel is to present an overview of as many types of marine debris challenges and activities that are actually underway to address them. And so this includes both types of marine debris and strategies and tools to address the problem. The topics for the specific agenda items here on the agenda, excuse me, I'm going to go back. The topics for the specific panel presentations are listed in your agenda, so I'm not going to go through exactly what they are and you're going to find out in just a minute anyway. But briefly we're going to have presentations on derelict fishing gear, abandoned and derelict vessels, source reduction for solid waste, removal of plastics and other waste that's actually in the water and on education and policy leadership. So together these case studies will provide a strong and broad foundation for understanding what's happening on the ground across the region and for highlighting how we are leading the way for addressing these challenges. So with that introduction, I'd like to introduce our first panelist. And as we mentioned this morning, full biographical information is available on the website and again the link for that is on your agenda. So I'm just going to give you the praise seat. Our first panelist is Cherie Patterson. She's the supervisor of marine programs at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department where she has worked for 39 years. Ms. Patterson supervises the marine, anadromous, fisheries statistics, recreational fisheries and invertebrate fisheries units of the marine fisheries division. Ms. Patterson. Good afternoon. Nobody can fall asleep for mine. I don't care what happens afterward. I've got to stay awake for mine. OK, I would like to thank Roger Williams School of Law and the Marine Affairs Institute for this opportunity to share New Hampshire's efforts in working with marine debris issues. While we only have 18 miles of coastline, we are still a power player. We do have actually some interesting marine debris statistics. For example, 80 to 85% of ocean based marine debris is from commercial fishing in the Gulf of Maine, and that's just considering three states. And New Hampshire was one of the largest contributors of that. So we do have an uphill climb. And we have started that climb. I'd also like to thank Senator and Dr. Whitehouse and Keith for initiating the memory retention rule of seven with exposing the crowd with similar information as I'm going to be presenting. Here we go. So I'm going to be presenting three issues and how we have tried to address these issues. The first being ghost fishing gear and derelict fishing gear. Ghost fishing gear differs marginally from derelict fishing gear. It is essentially actually fishing. It's actually got the ability to trap fish, trap animals, affect habitat, and act as a hazard to navigation. Derelict fishing gear can be umbrellaed under that, but it is considered discarded lost or abandoned fishing gear in the marine environment, which could also just mean the shoreline. It doesn't have to be in the water. Now we have addressed these concerns with our industry, and we get a common response. Well it's habitat, right? However, we have to then present some interesting statistics to our commercial and recreational industry that in fact they are losing money in both the commercial and recreational industries by having some of this gear out there. Some studies estimate that over 90% of species caught in this gear are of commercial value. They also contribute, of course, to the mortality, as you've seen earlier today, of protected species. Habitats are impacted. For example, lobster traps come in, they get blown in, they're rubbing against muscle beds. That's just one example. So you have loss of organisms, not just those dying in the gear, but also those that the gear is being, that is affected. So coral beds is one of the more pressing issues that I know Florida is dealing with, with gear. We have economics as an issue. We are getting it across to our commercial and recreational industry that they are losing money by having gear lost. Not only because they are losing gear and having to replace it, but they are also having that loss of organisms that they are out after. And of course, vessel damage, not just in the large ships, but also on their vessels also. The picture here depicts a lobster in a lobster trap that Bob Glenn from Massachusetts has been conducting a study. In this particular lobster trap has been in the water for two years. There are escape panels that are supposed to degrade if there is gear lost in the water. However, it becomes biofouled. So those panels don't actually degrade and fall off and allow organisms to move in and out. So this is another aspect that you heard earlier that there is the need for studies out there to adjust gear for this sort of loss. Again, this just kind of shows that not only are big ships impacted by gear, derelict fishing gear, but also, again, as I mentioned, smaller vessels are also affected. Now derelict gear is found in marine waters. You do have large balls. In this case, you're looking at a supernet in the Hawaiian Islands that took, I believe it was NOAA and other NGOs in the area, almost a week, to get it out of the water. And whales, the protected species that are affected. We also have, as I mentioned earlier, the shoreline effects. We have your wildlife. This is a piping plover that has nylon line wrapped around it. And they are only on the shoreline for a short period of time. And this would definitely affect their feeding habitat, as well as their young that they're trying to raise. And we also have piles of derelict gear that shows up at storms and such that have organisms in them that need to be removed if they are going to survive, of course. So the second issue is whose responsibility is this? Well, is it the fishing community themselves? A lot of times they throw up their hands and say, well, it's not my gear. Federal and state government agencies funding is an issue. Municipalities, where a lot of times they're the ones that do clean up their particular beaches or their particular areas, and NGOs are always there to jump in and help out. And it does take the village to do this. The third issue is how do you deal with the disposal of this? Harvesters may have a prohibition to bringing any of their gear that is destroyed to transfer stations. We have that problem in most of our coastal communities. And then it becomes very expensive for the industry to take them to particular facilities that will deal with their particular gear. Some municipalities have been sympathetic and have offered to supply some disposal services. And then they shut it off after a couple of months when they realize that it becomes a storage problem. So what you're seeing here in this picture is the town of Hampton doesn't quite know what to do with these large mountains of gear. So New Hampshire is working on solutions slowly with the industry. And we have many partners that we are partnering with to deal with these sort of issues that wash up on the beach at this point in time. I'm going to focus on one particular area at this point in time where we have public. On beaches. And we have a state agency who's responsible for state beaches, state parks. And they like to keep these things very well groomed in order to meet their demands of a state agency towards the public. And I think somebody, I don't know if the person is here who talked about Hampton Beach. I presume that they were talking about New Hampshire. I'm very sorry you got that response. So New Hampshire fortunately has a couple of regulations that we can work with. We have prohibited anybody but law enforcement officers and owners of gear. Yes, they're getting younger every day. They're the only ones that can go and recover the gear. And that has to do with the course theft of property and such. And as a result, that kind of leaves people limited as to how they can address their jobs if they're not with Fish and Game as the state parks has found out. And their acronym is DRED. Yes, it's an unfortunate acronym, but you might hear me say this every now and then. So fortunately when we were approached by DRED as to how we can work together to deal with the gear that keeps coming up on the beach, we had a statutory avenue to be able to say yes, we'll enter into a cooperative agreement with you and since you're out there grooming the beaches and walking the shoreline, that you could pick up the gear and handle it. Of course this came with conditions through a memorandum of agreement that said both person and vehicle must be identified as a DRED person or vehicle. You must release the living organisms that are in the gear. They have to contact us the minute they pick up any of the gear and it gets disposed of in a particular area. But they give us identifying information on an Excel spreadsheet. And at that point in time they will take the gear, I'm sorry, they'll take the gear and determine whether it's functioning or non-functioning gear and they kind of divide it up and I'll show you what happens with that. So you heard Keith earlier talk about the Fishing for Energy program and New Hampshire was fortunate enough to be a member of that program now. There we have, we work directly with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and there are contacts through the Covanta and the Snitcher Steel where we have a bin set up. Not only does DRED have the ability to go and use this facility but also the commercial and recreational industry does too. So they now no longer are prohibited from going where they need to go to get rid of some of this gear, instead of just dropping it off the coast when they're done with it. They can actually utilize this program. I'm not seeing what you're seeing so that's why I'm a little delayed here, I'm sorry. So they get to define what's identifiable functional gear. In other words, is it something that somebody can use again or the owner can use again. In that case, they pile it up next to the bin. The non-functional gear, they throw in the bin for us. And that way Fish and Game contacts the owner and they are provided one to two weeks to come and pick up that gear. Sometimes if there's storms that are happening, we'll give them two weeks, other than that, we give them a short period of time, go get your gear. If they don't get it, it gets put into the bin. We don't want to run into the same problem that municipalities have run into with storing gear. So we've been fortunate enough to have the industry's approval, so to speak, of moving forward with this program. They have been utilizing it to its full extent and in fact we have found people that show up in the bin and are grabbing gear out of the bin to reuse it for themselves. Now that's not something that's legal again. Once it goes into the bin, it belongs to the state. It's part of the Fishing for Energy program. So they are told they can't do that. The industry itself also has, for the last 20 years, doing a coastal cleanup once a year. This seems to be a pretty common practice throughout most of the states. Whereas in April, usually after winter months where you have large storms, a lot of gear coming up on the shore before tourists show up and they will do a one-day beach cleanup. And then we have also other NGO coastal cleanups that occur throughout the year with blue oceans and SeaQuant. So we do try and affect change and we are making every attempt to get the information and outreach out there for the commercial and recreational industry. And that's all I have. Which is, have you seen any reduction in the amount of derelict fishing gear that's washing up or gets cleaned up in this coastal cleanup as a result of the Fishing for Energy program? We have not because this is our first year, so we have no comparison. We have tried to do that with our coastal cleanups, however it just depends on the weather. If we have large storms, we see a lot of gear. If we don't have large storms in the wintertime, we see of course less gear. We have initiated a new rule based on whale safe gear and whale regulations coming from NOAA fisheries that if you have to fish your gear now, if your gear has not been fished in 30 days, then you're liable for up to $2,000 fine and removal of the gear. So this we are in hopes of making people aware of where the gear is, how often it needs to be fished in so it doesn't become more derelict gear. Thank you very much for that presentation. Our next speaker will be Gary Powers. Gary is the Deputy Chief Legal Counsel with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. He holds a JD from Northeastern University School of Law and an AB from Brown University in Political Science and Economics. Thank you. Well I'd like to begin by thanking, as you've heard from the other speakers, echo the same thanks to Roger Williams for sponsoring again this annual event and also to Senator and Dr. Whitehouse for their attendance in particular. Now I don't, my name is Gary Powers, so therefore I don't need a PowerPoint presentation. What you see is what you get. Now in 2012, Roger, what you have in this state was a recognition of a problem. In the Rhode Island General Assembly established the derelict, an abandoned vessel, an obstruction removal account. And pursuant to this account, the monies were to be used to assist DEM and those municipalities that had problems with abandoned and derelict vessels in their jurisdictions. This money was accrued from the registration of vessels, a pittling sum, quite frankly, $2 for those vessels that were 15 feet or less, and $20, which is the maximum fee for any vessel that is 51 feet or longer. Also established the commission of which I've been a legal counsel since its inception. We were to set up guidelines for the standards that were to be used for prioritization of removal projects pursuant to the chapter. This we accomplished and we established in the form of regulations the derelict, an abandoned vessel, an obstruction removal commission rules and regulations. These regulations are available on the DEM website and it's sometimes tricky to maneuver through that website. So one would look at the division of law enforcement and then look into the division of law enforcement rules and regulations and there you'll find it. Those regulations provide two appendices. One provides for the application form and the other provides the guidelines by which the commission ranks the various applications that are submitted to the commission. The commission has two annual routine application periods, July 1 in November 1. In addition, on an emergency basis, any public entity can submit funding for emergency removal of any vessel. Now the following are two examples of projects that have been funded through the account. On September 18, 2015, the town of Portsmouth was issued a grant from the account in the amount of $23,040, $400, excuse me, in order to cover the cost of the removal and disposal of a partially submerged vessel from Blue Hill Cove. The records revealed that the owner was identified, but the Portsmouth police had tried on repeated occasions unsuccessfully to have the owner address the problem. Having been unsuccessful, they appealed to the commission and the commission, as I said, awarded the $23,000 sought. The second project involved the division of law enforcement's removal of a vessel that was blocking the channel just south of Fields Point near the Providence River. That cost $7,800. That occurred in June of this year. Now the account is not an insurance policy. It does not provide a means by which the funding of removal of vessels is somehow included in your registration fee. Rather, if the registered owner is identified, the owner is sent a demand letter by the commission, and if there's a means by which we can resolve it, so be it. If the commission's efforts are unsuccessful, the commission then is statutorily required to refer to the Attorney General's office. The Attorney General's office is required to initiate a recovery action. If successful under either means, the money is deposited into the account, which is a restricted receipt account, which is peculiar to the state. That means it is limited in its purposes. Now at this point, I was anticipating questions, so therefore it was a rather short presentation. Shall I return to my seat? Why don't we ask a few follow-up questions, and maybe I'll start with the, Rhode Island has made a difference from some of our neighboring states in that our waters, our state-controlled and state-owned waters rather than under town jurisdiction, how does that state-versus-town dynamic work out in the implementation of this program? Well as I indicated, this program is intended to both assist towns and cities that have harbor jurisdiction and also the state itself in addressing derelict and abandoned boats. So therefore, it's a joint responsibility in these areas. The Portsmouth matter that I referenced, that was a matter in which the vessel had been It had been identified by Portsmouth as a problem to us for some time. We encouraged them to attempt to resolve it on their own, and only then did they come forward and indicate that it was not going to be resolved in that fashion. And therefore the $23,000 was issued to them after we realized that it was a good faith effort and it just wasn't going to be possible through the town's efforts. What we want to ensure is that the boat owner is somehow not looking upon this account as as I said, an insurance policy that somehow exonerates them from responsibility. And has this program, it's fairly not a program, has it been a model for other states, other regions, other jurisdictions around the country, around the world? We were contacted by the territory of the Virgin Islands just recently, who had asked us for both our statute and our regulations because they became aware of the program and they were interested in mirroring the same provisions in their territory. I must say that from what they've advised us, they're going to have a lot different problem down there. Warm waters down there attract a lot of folks who just sail down there and leave the boats. They have a lot of boats. We have few boats here, so they are inundated with vessels. It's almost like Florida with their floating cities that have a lot of people who are just living in the squalor that is developed by these abandoned vessels. But the Virgin Islands, as I said, is interested in employing the same method. We're next going to shift gears a little bit back towards the issue of plastics and consumer debris. Our next speaker will be Brock Callan. He is the executive director of Sail Martha's Vineyard, which is a public access educational organization that serves over 1,100 children and adults each year, both on the water and in the classroom, with an increasing emphasis on sustainability and environmental responsibility. On behalf of my board of directors and our 2,300-plus members and our sustainability partner, 11th Hour Racing, thank you for including me. I look at these other panelists and kind of figure, oh, I'm in a little over my head here, so bear with me. And I'll try to share with you an experience that Sail Martha's Vineyard began a few years ago and has met with, from our perspective, alarmingly receptive, or an alarmingly receptive community. Our locally sourced zero-waste event model. We began back in 2014, but before I give you a little bit of the history of that, I'm sure some of you are sitting there saying, well, why would an organization like Sail Martha's Vineyard be standing here talking to me pushing the right button? That name sort of doesn't make sense. Actually, our name belies who we are and what we do. We were formed 25 years ago now, really as an organization to teach island children how to row into sail and to welcome visiting vessels, specifically, sail training vessels. And that has morphed into where we're clearly a year-round organization and we have expanded dramatically. I always look at the metaphor of a stool. A stool needs three legs to stand. With one leg of rowing and sailing, we're not going to survive. Ten years ago, we had an education alarm. We wrote and teach the only maritime sciences curriculum in a high school in the Commonwealth and have just submitted the framework to the Commonwealth's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for its review and certification. Through all of this, and the sustainability, which I'll get to in a second, it's the third leg, through all of this, our mission has remained the same. I have to applaud the wisdom of our founders, which was to preserve and protect the maritime heritage and culture and the skills of Martha's Vineyard, but to also take care of the sea that surrounds us. The namesail Martha's Vineyard, people look at sail and go, okay, elite, costly, et cetera, et cetera. They kind of look at Martha's Vineyard the same way, but they're wrong. We have enjoyed it as an island. I used large quotation marks around enjoyed. More often than not in the last 10 years, Martha's Vineyard's been the second or third poorest county in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. People don't realize that until they come to Vineyard Haven in the middle of the winter on a Friday morning and look up at Stone Church where the food pantry is and look at the length of the line. Children in particular, adults also would not have access to the water if we did not exist. That's something we've held dear from day one to where we are today. But part of what we're doing is to try to instill in our entire constituency, youth and adult, the fact that, yes, we work with children and adults, but we work with sea as our medium. And if we don't make an effort to take care of the sea, then who we are, what we are, what we are able to do for that island will go away. So over the last few years, we have made an increasing effort to incorporate sustainability and environmental responsibility into everything we do, whether it's the academic programs, whether it's the summer learn to sail programs that attract over 450 kids, whether it's the lecture series during the winter, whether it's teaching for the Coast Guard up to 100 gross ton. We have woven in this message, I'm sure they see me coming and kind of go, oh, not again. But that's who we are and that's what we do. Let me carry on a little bit here. Well, can't do that. What is our goal? Our goal from the outset has been to make locally sourced and zero waste events the standard. Not only the standard on Martha's Vineyard Island, but the standard within the sailing community, be it a Key West race week or a Charleston race week, great big regattas. The Vineyard Cup Regatta, which is one of our fundraisers in the summer, attracts over 100 boats and usually somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 sailors. I'll give you some statistics in a few minutes as to the impact, the negative impact that event was having on the island and why we chose to address it. As an islander, we're there to protect our shorelines. We're there to protect our harbors, to protect our coastal ponds and our estuaries and the seabed. We're in the middle of doing a research project right now on there are 2,200 legal moorings on the Vineyard. That probably means there are about 3,000 total moorings on the Vineyard. But the standard design of those moorings is such that every day, to the extent that wind goes 360, which I really realize it doesn't, those systems scour over a million and a half square feet of seabed. No winter flounder, no wheel grass affecting the scallops, the co-hogs and some of the others. So there are now synthetic moorings and we are looking very carefully at those and actually have just written a grant so that all of our moorings, we have 91 boats, not 91 moorings, but 91 boats, so all of our moorings can become part of this whole effort. But I want to go back and spend some time with you on the locally sourced zero-waste event. How do we get there? How do we really make a zero-waste event? First of all, stop talking and start doing something. We didn't have a clue three years ago when we started this. Not a clue of what we were doing, but we had some basic ideas and I'll go through that sequence with you in a second. What we've done is to start very much at the grass roots level. We are working with the selectmen in each of the six towns on the vineyard to try to communicate the need to either get this on town meeting floor in the spring, and we're hopeful that Vineyard Haven will have it on the town floor, I'm sorry, on the floor of the town meeting this spring, but a local ordinance that would require events of greater than you name it, 50 people to have to subscribe to a zero-waste locally sourced event. Here said than done, I realize. On the other hand, what fascinates me is when we sit with the selectmen, we're getting no pushback, and when town council's there, we're still not getting any pushback. I expect we will. I'm not that naive, but it's amazing to me the momentum that we've begun to develop. We're working with the health departments in each community. I had a meeting yesterday with one of the chairs, and attitude is, of course this is a health issue. More importantly, it's a sustainability issue. Let me take you through this individual having to be a sailor, so I was a little bit preaching to the choir, but I took him through the process. We've created a punch list of how do you go about hosting an event like this. As a result of yesterday's meeting, I'm now on the agenda to meet with the health department, I don't know, another two weeks or so, because I want their support to help us get on the floor of town meeting. We've been collaborating with the DPW, the Department of Public Works. In one, two, three of the towns on the vineyard, the DPW is responsible for picking up garbage, responsible for operating the dumps. You have to realize that every ounce of garbage that's created on Martha's Vineyard goes off of Martha's Vineyard. We don't have any landfills any longer, so we have a carbon footprint that coming out of the box is almost double what any other communities would be, and you can't ignore that. We're in the process of taking a lot of the data that we've collected and will continue to collect and monetizing it, because we will show you that, in fact, this doesn't cost more money. Our experience has been it saves us money, us as an organization running event, and I don't know really enough about it to be an intelligent presenter, but we are exploring with council the possibility as an island of carbon offsets and what kind of revenue stream that could possibly create for the island. That's down the road, but at least it's on the table. As I alluded to earlier, we have met with success. We started, the idea we had, I went to the board early in 2014, I said, what if we try to just reduce all of the waste that we're creating with our seafood buffet and auction, which is about 400 people on the harbor, and then the vineyard cup, which has got another 1,000 or so, and see how far down we can get it. So we weren't prepared to get started in 2014 other than to use that as a base. So we were very careful. We didn't change any system or anything we did, and I'm not particularly proud to say that after three nights of race village activity, we generated 36 cubic yards of garbage. That was 36 cubic yards of garbage in a dumpster. 36 cubic yards of garbage had to get that dumpster picked up, taken to a transfer, garbage dumped, put into another one, taken off island, and up to a landfill. Talk about carbon footprint. In 2015, having a little bit of an idea what we're doing, but not really, we took 36 cubic yards and turned it into one cubic yard. 36 to 1, the magnificence of composting, recycling, returning, and reusing. That's all we did, 36 to 1, and this past summer, we turned it into four and a half pounds. Actually, four pounds, seven ounces. It fit in a cardboard box that was this long, this wide, maybe that high. 90% of it were the plastic bags that Ice Cubes came in. Thank you, Sam Adams. I thought I'd turned that off. Yeah, sure. I apologize. But the bottle caps were the rest of it. Less than four and a half pounds to the dump. Close to 1,300 people through the race village this year. That can be done. We've taken the model and to build momentum, we've gone to other non-profits. You have to realize there are 91 non-profits on Martha's Vineyard. All of us, I've got to raise money. And everybody tries to do it between the 1st of July and the 1st of September. Some of those events are big like ours. There's only one that's any larger. A lot of them are smaller, but collectively, they generate a staggering amount of waste. And just last week, what I know is the Historical Society now referred to as the Museum, which has a large fundraiser. Actually, I have two of them they've signed on. Hospice, we did two events for this past summer. We did their road race. I became very familiar with orange peels and single-use plastic bottles. But at the end of the day, everything that I took to the dump fit in a milk carton in one of those plastic boxes, that's it. Then we did their big auction and dinner. About 400 people worked with the caterers, set them up in such a way as they knew what was going where. And again, I think we were 13 pounds of waste. People say, well, what do you do with all that stuff? How do you make it go away? I have a high school saline team that will kill you for nickel bottles because they wanted new PFDs for the saline team this year. So every evening, after every event, there they are getting the nickel bottles. And on the vineyard, you've got to stick them in a machine one at a time. So they take over a machine room. They're three machines in the biggest one in the vineyard. And I don't know, they've raised close to 800 bucks this summer just on nickel bottles. Do the arithmetic. It's not a small amount. The farmers are my new bestest friends because they get in line for the compost. Think about it. I mean, what else would you do a compost? Put it in the garbage, it goes away. No, not the farmers. Because if you have pigs, corn cobs, they love them. Corn cobs usually take a long time to break down. I've got another farm. Morning Glory Farm says, yeah, if there's meat product in there, I'm not that concerned because that increases nitrogen, that increases heat. That cooks the compost even faster, liken that. So there are two things. In terms of reusing, we do not use any compostable paper plates, bamboo knives, and forks. That stuff must have half life of a million years. It just doesn't go away. So what we did was go online. We got linen napkins at 6 cents a copy. And we have cleaners on the island that actually can clean them. And bag and force, we'll use them next year. We rented the plates, although we've now started a plate cooperative, where if you've got a set of dishes, or three dishes, or nine dishes, or 12 dishes, whatever it is, bring them down. They're going to my barn. And then when there's an event, well, come down. You got a wedding? Sure, pick any design you want, mix and match. And we didn't start this. My sister-in-law started this out on Vashon Island in the Northwest. Spectacular idea. I mean, I love Sandy Cooper well. She used the Reddoll Company on the island. But Sandy, I don't need to be paying you a buck of plate. And so we've collected these plates. We do it that way. Again, we're not, if you will, upon trashing the compost. It's pure, good compost. I'll talk a little bit more about how big a deal that is. We've got the Agricultural Society. And I'm not going to let Selmarthes Vineyard take credit for this. I'm going to suggest that it was one woman who had a vision. Young woman had a vision. And five volunteers, I was one of them, decided we're going to collect all post-consumer compostables at the Agricultural Fair. The Agricultural Fair runs for four days, probably three to 4,000 people every night. How much compost do you think we collected? Because we weighed every barrel. Over a ton and a half. That's a ton and a half that would have gone, again, to the transfer center, into a new container, off island, on up. It can be done with a little bit of effort, very simple, very inexpensive signage, and a smile on your face. I'm rambling on here. And I know my time, if I go too long, yell at me. Because I could talk all night on this. Communicate. Any time we have a chance to preach, we're preaching. Because we've got a track record now. We want that track record to get better. We want it to get off the island and broader. And as you'll see on my last slide, Sail Martha's Vineyard has made a commitment to the sailing community. If we have to travel to Key West, oh, darn, in January, be happy to come down and help you with your event. Yes, five minutes, OK. I better be cooking here, sorry. OK, what have we learned? We have learned it can be done. Period. A little bit of effort, no more money. And we've also learned that garbage receptacles are bad. I'm being a little facetious there. But why do I say that? You're well-intentioned. You're organizing for your event. You put a garbage can there, garbage can there, there, there, there. And the good news is people will use them. The bad news is it's going to commingle what we know as waste. And so what we did was come up with a strategy that says, we're going to centralize all waste. And what we did for the Vineyard Cup this past summer is we had a 10 foot by 10 foot tent. We put sides on three sides and across the front a banner. Dark blue banner was about, I don't know, three, three and a half feet high. And there was on the front of it red compost, then recycle, return, reuse. There were barrels behind the first three and a long table behind the reuse. And then the key to our success was we used kids. Kids are great. They're fantastic adults. So much. But we bought them green t-shirts that said green team. And they would be behind in the tent, some of them behind these. And it's one thing when Brock Allen comes up to you and says, I'm sorry, no, that's a nickel bottle. That goes over here. And there's another thing when a nine-year-old girl comes up, sir, excuse me, but that's a nickel bottle. It goes over there, please. Oh, of course. What was fascinating was by Saturday night, the sailors were coming and doing it all themselves. The kids didn't have to do it. But we also had the kids busing the tables because they remembered those plates. And people said, oh, didn't they spill or didn't they drop an angel? No, we took basically 20 minutes to train the kids how they're going to do it. Done little things. One plate at a time or one glass at a time. Always ask, are you finished, ma'am? Are you finished, sir? Let me tell you, it was a home run. We got more compliments than the kids than we did the whole regatta, you know? And but in the kid business, that's cool by me. I'm loving it. And again, we talked about volunteer training. What I did was to have an adult as basically a team leader. But when I say adult's question mark, Saturday night, the team leader had to get his hands dirty. Just wanted to get right in. Oh, did he screw it up? And literally had to go and say, no. Let's push you aside here. Leave these kids. Let these kids do it. And they did an awesome, awesome, awesome job. Locally sourced. People say, yeah, right, you live on an island, local. I'm telling you, local. As I mentioned earlier, we have this island factor. Everything that has to be brought onto the island. And then anything that even looks like waste has to be taken off the island or gets dropped on the ground and blows into the sea or onto our beaches. Again, that carbon footprint that's twice the size of the North. Literally, hate to tell you this, but I went to the farm and kind of walked through the pig pen and going, sorry. Sorry. But we got this great guy on island. It's called Local Smoke, a guy named Tim Larson. And we did, I think, three pigs Friday night. We did chicken Saturday night. This year, we did lobster salad, lobster rolls, Sunday night. And last year, Tim said, let's go to the dock. Why don't you go to the dock and buy swordfish? I knew a little bit about the business. So I went down. I bought a 180-pound swordfish and boned it out. And Tim smoked the swordfish. I got to tell you, it was unbelievable. But I'm halfway through the weekend, and I go, oh, man. That's not a sustainable fishery. We're not doing that again. So that's why we went to Lobster. But right down to the salt, there's a company on the island now that makes salt or just whatever the technical term is. So we really are local. Obviously, it saves cost. It completely reduces the carbon footprint. I am a liar. The bread was done in Falmouth, which is seven miles away by open water. And this year, we had to get an extra cow, which came from Dartmouth. But other than that, honest to God, it's from the island. Now, I know there's some lawyers that want to be lawyers out there. No resistance-only support. And they're all sitting there saying, you'll have your day, my boy. And yeah, we probably will. But if we continue to do what we're doing and develop a track record and a compelling story and sort of a groundswell of support, I think it becomes easier, not hard. The economics are compelling. We're getting down now to where we can actually measure, are we going to be able to have an impact on the number of trucks that actually go off the island, up to the landfill. That's what we're looking to do. And also, a willingness to expand beyond our shores, take this idea, which we now know works, and take it to other regattas, take it to other events. And they don't have to be warm weather events in the middle of the winter. I'll go anywhere, because I think this can make a difference. Or I know this can make a difference. Bam. I'm out at a conference last week and somebody made the comment, why do we call it the planet Earth when 70% of its surface is covered by the oceans and 71% is covered by water? And 96.3% is water. And we all have an obligation to do something about the problems that our seas exhibit every day. You know, I look at the name, Martha's Vineyard is synonymous with Velcro for garbage or marine debris. You walk our South Beach and it's unbelievable the amount. I took a class out last week. I gave them each, and this is the end, I promise. I gave each, paired them up in kids by two, gave each a 10 foot piece of rope, said one of you stay in the middle, other grab a stick, and make a 10 foot circle. This is South Beach. This is where everybody wants to go, right fork in Egerton. I want you to count the number of pieces of plastic you find in that 10 foot circle. What do you think the smallest number was? The class of 14, so there's seven teams. I say you can pick any place in the beach you want. 23 is the fewest number of pieces, and obviously that wasn't microscopic pieces which were there. These were identifiable pieces of plastic. Can we make a difference? You bet you can. And sale Martha's Vineyard 11th hour are committed to making that difference, and thank you so much for the time today. Thank you. Thank you. A great example of the power of grassroots development, and a great segue into our next presenter who's going to talk about how do you get the material out of the ocean once it's in there. Our next speaker will be David McLaughlin who's the co-founder and director of Clean Ocean Access which is a nonprofit organization based in Middletown, Rhode Island, working to eliminate marine debris, improve water quality, and maintain shoreline access. He received his BS and his MS in applied mathematics from the Florida Institute of Technology with a concentration in atmospheric science and physical oceanography, so we have a scientist among us. Watch out. All right, good afternoon. Thanks for having this event. Clean Ocean Access has been around since 2006, and I'll be honest, this is the first I've heard of this symposium, so I've got some catching up to do on the great work that's been happening here, but I can definitely tell that it is happening. I wanted to take some time today to talk about marine atrass skimmers that we've put in place at Newport Harbor. I think you've heard a lot today about the problems, opportunities, solutions, and this really falls kind of into that solution space, but as with anything, the more we learn, the more we've got to figure out how to do the next part of the project. I want to first start it off by saying this type of project, putting in some type of solution in Newport Harbor, it only happens because of great partnership, so working with 11th Hour Racing in the city of Newport is the reason why we're able to make this happen. So the problem that we have in Newport Harbor is when stormwater runs off, it enters the harbor, and as you can imagine, when that happens, it contains pollutants and it contains debris. It impairs water quality and it degrades aquatic habitat. So that's what we knew. We've all seen it before, predominantly after it rains, but occasionally after large events, which with Brock's protocol, those would go away, but it's definitely something that we need to address. I know most of you are from around the area, but I think a few of you are from out of town, so just a quick little map. You know, we're where the yellow sunshine is, and downtown in Newport, and the far northeast corner is Pirate Park. The main sources of debris there is a 60-inch diameter stormwater outfall pipe that basically collects all of the runoff from a fair amount of the city of Newport and drains right into Newport Harbor. This is a picture from the weekend of May 30th, the Newport and the far left-hand corner is this discharge pipe that I was talking about, and also you can see the type of debris. I don't know if the resolution's there, but there's a lot of small plastic, there's a lot of cigarette butts, and there are some consumer waste that's in the water column as well. So the goal that we established for the project was how do we reduce the amount of marine debris in Newport Harbor? That's really what we wanted to do, but part of it also is to increase the recreational value of the waterfront as well. I mean, that's the whole purpose of Clean Ocean Access, is our mission is to take action today so future generations can enjoy ocean activities. We also want to bring awareness to the type of re-accumulating debris. It's one of those things where you need the data to be able to influence change, so keeping track of what we find was a very important part of it. And last but not least, promoting the environment and stewardship. We've really got to find a way to get people involved to take better care of the environment. So before we go on to the project that we actually put into Newport Harbor, I wanted to give you just a quick overview of some of the different types of solutions that are being developed right now to address the problem of what I'll say is existing debris in the ocean. They come in different sizes. We're gonna start with the first one, massive. So the Ocean Cleanup Project. This idea has been around for probably four to five years. The idea is that we've got all this plastic in the ocean, there's these gyres. And the novel idea is we have to somehow create a boom-like system. We have to somehow harvest all this debris. We have to have some type of vehicle or mechanism that's gonna collect the debris, separate out the organics and the sea life, and then collect all the debris. So this is really, I would say, still conceptual. There's prototypes being put in place. There's a lot of challenges with this, but this is a type of solution that's really looking at how do we fix the global problem of existing marine debris in the ocean. Second type, harvesters. These have been around for a while. So these are sensually boats with the proper equipment on them to go around surgically into the right areas in harbor's marinas to actually collect marine debris that accumulates in particular areas. So the key thing with the harvesters is these are moving. These are moving around to where the debris actually is. The next idea is the water wheel. So this is a stationary object that uses a boom to actually collect the debris. This water wheel right here is from Baltimore. It's been highly successful, cost close to a million dollars. In the small picture, you can see an example of a similar water wheel that's actually helped to accumulate all the debris. It essentially goes into the system. The wheel is both powered by the water movement as well as solar power. It collects it. There's actually in the back of the unit, there's actually a dumpster and the material is deposited into the dumpster and then that dumpster is essentially taken off. It probably goes to the landfill. But this is a highly effective method of collecting marine debris. If you've got this type of area where there's a high probability that it's accumulating. So this is an interesting concept. The next is the trashcumbers. So this is a picture from Parati Park, the trashcumbers that we've installed. They're approximately four feet wide by six feet long. It's a stationary object. It handles a medium-sized amount of debris, obviously not the scale of the last two solutions. But again, depending on what area you are, it can be a highly effective method for addressing the problem of the marine debris. And last but not least, I think this idea here got a lot of attention with their Kickstarter a couple of years ago. The seabin, this is the smallest size unit that I've seen available right now in the market. This is something that one person could operate. It obviously has a much smaller capacity, but it's got that same principle, which is that there's existing debris in the water, and all of these methods provide an option of how somehow to accumulate the debris to remove it from the ocean. So those are the ideas. So the project design that we put together of how to put in a marine atrascimer in Newport Harbor, first started by identifying the problem area, which was Parati Park in Newport Harbor. The second piece was really building partnerships, both with a funding source, with the people to help with the project. Running a trashcimer or a harvester or even the ocean cleanup. These aren't things that really, you want to take on yourself. It takes a lot of work. You need to be down there every day. So getting the city of Newport and the Harbormasters partners was an invaluable component, and that's really an important part of the memorandum of understanding of creating. We reviewed the solution options of the vendors. In this particular case, the trashcimmers are made by a group called Marine Accessories out of Bellingham, Washington. So that was the approach that we took. The next was we developed a project plan, looked for a grant proposal and additional partners. We worked with the city, we gained city support, we developed a memorandum of understanding between the city and clean ocean access as to how we would actually operate the units. And last but not least, but the final piece was getting the grant award to actually make this happen. I can't emphasize the importance of the partnerships with everyone to make these type of things happen. But there were other partners that wanted to help out as well. So communicating with partners, whether it's a marina that's gonna help you install the units, whether it's an electrician that's gonna hook up the wiring, a communications company that helps promote the message. There are a lot of pieces that need to put in place. And the next three steps are really straightforward, which is to implement, take action, and also use it as a vehicle for education. So I think at this point we're gonna play a video of what actually happened when we put them in the water. In 2016, Clean Ocean Access decided to tackle the problem of trash and Newport Harbor by installing two trash skimmers near Parati Park in partnership with the city of Newport Harbor Master, all made possible with funding from 11-Dollar Racing. With help from Casey Marina, Casey Tree Specialists, Mac Designs, Six Square Communications, and Toner Electric, we successfully installed the skimmers in early August, and the units are delivering great results. The trash skimmers operate 24 hours a day, trapping floating debris, soaking up oil sheen, and improving water quality. They are a highly effective method for addressing surface debris, require very little maintenance, and use a small amount of electricity. Besides just removing floating debris from Newport Harbor, our objectives are to inspire, educate, and empower the community to make simple changes to reduce the source of the debris. Whether it's reducing the use of single-use plastics, or ensuring no trash ends up as litter, marine debris is a solvable problem, and it starts with making smart choices on land. Whether it's the wind or waves that gets us in the water, or simply walking along the waterfront, it's these experiences that connect us to nature, and must be the reason that we take action to sustain life on our planet. For more information, please contact us at cleanoceanaccess.org. It's a little bit about what it was like to put it in place. Gotta give my friends who made the video a little credit. So, a little bit about the skimmer specifics. Again, the vendor we worked with that is out of Bellingham, Washington. To the best of my knowledge, there's about 35 of these units in operation. Most, all of them are on the west coast of the United States, except for one unit that's in Kuala basin in Hawaii. I think there's a few units in Washington, DC, but to the best of my knowledge, they're not deployed just yet. So, we're the first group on the east coast. The units cost about $9,600 to get them landed here, because they come by truck, it's a little bit north of $10,000. The material that were made out of it is a rotomoto non-corrosive polyethylene, so it is plastic, but it's meant to last for a very long time. The units are reasonable size, I wouldn't pick one up. I mean, 600 pounds. Basically the size of a medium-sized dumpster, that's the best way to describe it. From a power consumption, it has a three-fourths horsepower motor. It's 120 volts. It uses a small amount of electricity. Our units are actually locked into a much larger electrical grid, so they're not actually getting really good statistics. It's locked into the same electrical that's used for the ballpark and the street lights. So, it's tough to figure out how much of a drain it's had. In terms of operation, every day we check the units, and we look to empty the units. We emptied the units yesterday morning. As you know, with the wind direction change overnight with the cold front, when we checked them this morning, there wasn't much debris. But that's a case of where the Harbor Master goes down and inspects the units and then communicates back to us. So, we have them on right now, and we expect to go down and check them out tomorrow morning, and there should be something there. On a weekly basis, there's always some maintenance. We've got a pot of rate at the bottom. We've got to scrub the unit. We've got to check the electrical connections. And on a seasonal basis, you need to remove the scammers, pressure wash them, and do really a full inspection. So, the results so far. We've had the units in place since early August. They've been operating approximately 12 to 18 hours per day. Again, there's maybe 35 or 40 units in operation, so they are make to order. We encountered one or two issues in the beginning, so we're currently not running them 24 hours a day, although they definitely are designed to be run that way. We empty the units as required. It's, you know, historically now it's been about five times per week. We removed the units in early October for maintenance. There were no surprises. It was essentially what the outside of a boat would look like if you didn't take it out for a while, so there was a fair amount of barnacle buildup, but not that much. And we're aiming to operate the units until the water hits 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So, the idea of ice accretion, the eventer doesn't have much experience with that because it's on the West Coast, so we don't really want to be the first person to figure out what happens or doesn't happen, so we're going to be taking them out of the water. Because you never know, we could have a warm winter or they could stand the whole time. So, I appreciate the comment that Jonathan Stone from Save the Bay made a little while ago. One of the interesting things that we're finding in the output from the trash scammers is the small pieces of plastic. I mean, these certainly aren't things that we would find as we do a beach cleanup. When we inspect the debris that we get out of the skimmers, certainly has your food wrappers, your fishing line, your bottles, your straws, your cigarette butts, all of that type of stuff that's expected that you could find, but buried within this fine layer, almost like in the rack zone on a beach, there's just hundreds if not thousands of little pieces of plastic. So, it's definitely not in the microplastic category, but it's very, very small, and it's quite interesting that we found it. So, a couple takeaways about the program. The first is the education. Really, the connection of stormwater, litter, and marine debris. You know, this is one of the things where people ask the question of where does all this debris come from? And this is really bringing attention and awareness to the fact that in this particular area, it is a stormwater issue. I mean, it does come in with the Southwest Breeze, but it's really coming from the runoff, from the streets. You know, the technology, as I mentioned, with the ocean cleanup, which is that large boom across the ocean, a big challenge is gonna be how do you separate between the organics and the man-made material? And what we're finding is with the trash scammers, is we also basically have brought that problem right home to Newport Rhode Island, because on a regular day, when we look at the debris, it's got sometimes a one-to-one ratio between macroalgae as well as man-made waste. So, we do do a fair amount of separation, but it is a case where a lot of this is co-mingled. So, if we're dealing with this in the harbor, you can only imagine what it's like in the middle of the ocean, more to come on that. So, from an implication point of view, I would definitely say don't estimate the time required to coordinate in-kind partners. It is great to have professionals help. I wouldn't do it a different way, but in the middle of the summer, implementing units in Newport is a very difficult thing to do. So, you just have to be patient and really focus on effective operation before promoting the results. This is building something new. It's brand new, and so it really takes little patience to really take the time to figure out how it's working, build up some track record of how it's actually operating, and then get in your position to really share the information. So, this is a picture of what it looks like when we go down to take a look at what's come through the skimmer. At first, you can say, well, it looks like a lot of eelgrass, and there is a fair amount, but then when you actually start going through the material, there's a ton of trash. So, that's a little sample right there. So, I wanted to bring together a couple ideas of some of the work we do with beach cleanups, as well as the solutions that were put in place with trash skimmers, and try to frame this topic that I think some other people have done a really great job at. We've been doing regular scheduled beach cleanups since 2006. We get them twice a month, nine months a year, as well as every week in the summer, and we've removed quite a bit of debris from the shorelines of Aquinic Island. It's actually quite alarming when you think about it. We've also have a flexible cleanup program where our goal is to adopt the entire coastline of the island with small groups going out and doing regular, but flexible, scheduled cleanups, and currently we've got about 40 groups doing that. And last but not least, we've got the skimmers in place. So, we've got a combination of both fixed schedule, flexible schedule, as well as proactive solutions to try to address the problem of marine debris. But, we're trying to look at the problem of marine debris with a slight different focus because a lot of people ask questions about where is this all going? So, we look at marine debris from the aspect of what's the transport source? And we look at marine debris as something that arrives on the coastline by wind and wave action. The source, the origin may be known or might not be known. If you leave something on the beach and it ends up at another beach, that's basically marine debris. So, there's a lot of things that are coming into the coastline. And we think that the solution is we've got to remove it. We've got to keep steadfast on doing marine debris removal events until there's none left. So, that's one way of looking at the topic of this concept of ocean health. The next is litter. So, I look at litter from a perspective that it's accidental or careless action. We only have three categories, so we lump everything into this category that is either, it was unintentional. It's just got there because we just didn't know better or because people just didn't take responsibility. Obviously, it's people using the coastline or the ocean and we think the solution is prevention. Prevention comes in a lot of different ways, education, outreach. And then we've got this next thing that we call illegal dumping. And we look at it from it being a behavior of intentional action. People are actually making a choice to do this and that really is where I see a difference between litter and illegal dumping as the behavior. The source is obviously people using the coastline and the solution is enforcement. There's good regulations in place, but we just need a lot more enforcement for a lot of these environmental rules. So, we're trying to look at the framework of how do we address this topic, this little inset picture right here is at Pheasant Drive Beach, looking north at the Mount Hope Bridge. So, I think we're in the foreground of that picture. But when you think about removal, prevention and enforcement, these are really I think the three things that we need to think about mobilizing and creating a framework for actually moving forward of addressing this issue. We put a lot of things in that category called litter. It's unintentional or careless action, so you just didn't know the problem was gonna be there. But the illegal dumping is something that we really have an issue with. Majority of the beach cleanups that we do on Rhode Island, I would say, it's mostly litter with some marine debris and some illegal dumping. So, next steps in your community, if you wanted to do some of the types of these projects, or you know someone in a marina area or a coastal community, obviously identifying the problem, the source, the frequency, you should do a fair amount of field work to inspect the area. Predict the value of each solution. Define key partnerships and engage the community. You really want community support. Put together a strategy and a project plan. And last but not least, you've gotta take action. This is a time sensitive issue. We've gotta work now to protect the oceans. So, with that in mind, thank you very much. Okay, thank you so much. You have it productive, let me have it. Sorry. You're closing it down before I put it? Yeah! We do have another presentation. Our last but not least, we'll have Dr. Catherine Owens, who's an associate professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies, and director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Hartford. Dr. Owens, research is the way policy is implemented and the impact it has in the world. And Keith Jolino mentioned her project this morning and we're gonna get a little bit more on the short of the state house. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about being here. And you told me what to do. Read with the, do I do the clicker? The right arrow. Okay. The right arrow on the, I see it now. Okay. There are actually, there are two sets of arrows, which is why it's quite confusing on that. Only one works. Yay! Yes, okay, great. Thank you so much. And thank you for having me. I'm really excited about being here and telling you about my project from shore to state house. So the reason this project came about is I feel like educators, folks at nonprofits, artists and also scientists grapple with how to communicate complex environmental ideas to the public. And I certainly do that as an educator. And especially those issues that are tied to human behavior. And so I was researching the issue of marine debris. You can see our favorite photo yet again, Chris Jordan's, one of his photographs of the albatross. I began to research the issue of marine debris and I discovered that researchers do believe that this is a solvable problem and you've heard that a lot today. But they believe that there are a couple of things we need to be sure to do if we're going to solve this problem effectively. And that includes education and outreach, of course. But also work that doesn't just go for the symptoms, but also tries to address the root problems. And that takes local context into account, considers human behavior and consumption choices, and then eventually creates strong policy. So I took all of that into account and came up with the proposal that I submitted to the NOAA Marine Prevention, Marine Debris Prevention through Education and Outreach Program, the shortest state house project. I wanted to see if I could create a class at the University of Hartford that would try to do all of these things. So I would introduce students to the idea, concept of marine debris and pollution. I would guide them in the process of collecting debris and tracing the life cycle of that debris so we could talk about where it came from, not just those symptoms. And then challenge them to use this data to contextualize policy solutions for our state legislatures, legislatures. So today I'm gonna tell you what we did, how we did it, a couple of the lessons I learned along the way. And I'm gonna talk a little bit also about the impact it had on my students because I measured that as well. So in many ways, this is like a typical undergraduate course. It was semester long, in-person class that included readings, lectures, discussions, all the things you would find in a regular class. But it had this added experiential and service learning component. And that included four beach cleanups in beautiful winter on the Connecticut shoreline where we would get debris, we would weigh it, measure it, catalog it. And then I had the students create posts on a tumbler site where we took what we found and they looked at the specific risks associated with that kind of debris and also things that could have happened earlier in the consumption chain, let's say, to prevent that kind of debris from ending up on our shorelines. And then we were to share our results with the state legislature. So I talked with wildlife officials in my state, of course, throughout this process and they recommended Bluff Point State Park, which is on the sound in Connecticut. So I took my students, on February 6th, a group, we were about an hour and a half from the coast up in Hartford. And we arrived, it was cold, it was rainy, a little snowy, it had snowed the day before. In fact, we weren't sure if the trip was going to happen at the last minute. And we got to Bluff Point Beach, it's about a mile hike from the parking lot out to the beach. And I have to be honest, we didn't find a whole lot. And my students were a little disappointed. It's not that we wanted there to be a marine debris, but we've been learning about this big global problem, we've been talking about it for weeks at this point. And we know that it's a problem in Connecticut, but we're not really seeing it on the ground. Because there had just been snow, we were only able to access from the high tide to the low tide line. So we were really seeing what had just come in with the last tidal cycle. Everything above that line was covered in several inches of snow. So we found some stuff, not a lot, but I think they liked being outside and hiking around anyway. And we planned our next trip, which was for the following day at Hammond Asset Beach in Connecticut. I don't know if you recall what February 7th was like this past year. It was Super Bowl Sunday, it was a beautiful day in Connecticut. Sunny, clear, a little warmer than the day before. And we had a fantastic time at Hammond Asset Beach. We went through our procedures collecting and we found a little bit more. Some of that snow had dissipated and we were able to kind of see up shore more debris. But because it was so pretty and we were working really hard, I guess, we finished a little early. And one of my students who was from Connecticut, which I'm not, said, why don't we check out Meg's Point? And I said, what's Meg's Point? And he said, it's just, my map's a little funny. It's just a kind of offshoot into the sound at the edge of Hammond Asset Beach State Park. And I thought we have maybe an hour before sunset when we have to leave. Sure, let's go check it out. So we went to Meg's Point, loaded up the bus, and this is what Meg's Point looks like. And it has this really distinctive rocky coastline. And in 20 minutes at Meg's Point, we found more debris than we had found in the previous four hours at two other sites. So I brought them back a few weeks later to Meg's Point again. And we found a great deal of debris. In fact, we found over 1600 individual pieces. And again, that was about eight hours of collecting, but almost all of that was from really two and a half hours at Meg's Point. And you can see that by far, the majority was plastic debris. And part of the idea of this class, right, is that we were gonna tie in this local context. So we'd been learning about the facts that plastic only constitutes about 10% of refuse, but a much higher percentage of marine debris. And we found that to be the case in Connecticut, though of course we don't know what the total of debris, how it breaks out, you know, state by state. And you can see our top five most frequently found items are for the most part plastic. It's different types of plastic film and hard plastic. And then smoking related items, which included cigar tips, cigarette butts, and lighters. And here you can see the different categories of items we found and how many items of each. These were the categories that my students created the tumbler about. So they did kind of a mini research project where they looked at peer reviewed articles about what these types of things, you know, the hazards associated with them for human health or wildlife. And then also talked about alternative alternatives that could have happened earlier in the consumer chain that might have prevented these types of items from appearing on our shores. And then we presented the results. This is me with some of my students and Senator Ted Kennedy Jr., who's the co-chair of the environmental committee of the Connecticut General Assembly. And he brought together a group of television stations who came and listened to our report and was really a fantastic experience at Hammond Asset Beach. This happened at the Hammond Asset Beach sort of environmental education center. So what did we learn? For me, active learning and engaged learning, I think really helps the students understand things in a deeper way. And I'm a real proponent of that. It is of course very time consuming. You have the field trips, right? Taking the students an hour and a half each way to the beach. But also the management that comes with making sure tie tables are right, that you're able to avoid weather disasters. We had two different trips that were canceled due to extreme weather, including a canoeing trip out to an island that wasn't possible because of weather conditions. It was difficult at times to do the collecting during the winter in New England. Though I can say it allowed us to avoid the nesting seasons of species of interest like piping clovers. So that was kind of a bonus. Also, connecting with policy makers was not as simple or straightforward as I anticipated. We had gotten their buy-in beforehand. But what I didn't realize, I knew Connecticut had a part time legislature and I knew that they would be meeting during this class. But I didn't understand that they would sort of be hitting their peak when they are spending a lot of time focused on bills and the budget right when we were ready to share our results. And so for several weeks, I was making phone calls and sending emails and trying to get a meeting with the representatives. And I'm thinking, it says short to state house in the title, I have to get to the state house. Or it's all for naught. So they really came through for us in the end and retrospectively, I know it worked out. But at the time, I wasn't 100% sure, Keith, I don't know if you know that, that it was gonna happen. But flexibility and persistence helped a lot with that. And I also think it's important to note that we weren't advocating for one particular policy. This is federal money. And so we really came to our meeting with the legislators to share what people had done in other places to address this kind of problem and to let them know about our specific data. But we weren't advocating for one policy over another. So part of this class for me as an educator was trying to understand what the impact was on my students. And to do that, I measured their attitudes, knowledge and behavior both at the beginning and the end of the semester. And I compared them to another class, another environmental science class that's a traditional laboratory-based class. And I did that because I wanted to put my students' scores in context. I would expect anyone taking a class with me or an environmental policy class to be a little bit more engaged on that than your typical student. So I wanted to put them in context in that way. And that's because I'm really interested in the relationship between environmental attitudes, knowledge and behaviors. And it's complex and not well understood. You might think that if you just tell someone about something, it will change their attitude and then their behavior. But research, decades of research say otherwise. And it doesn't automatically lead to improved environmental behaviors. But people who study environmental education believe that it can instill knowledge, improve attitudes and impart that efficacy and empowerment that's really critical for me to impart to my students. It doesn't just increase information, but it can include critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making through the experiential learning. So I used a number of, I don't know why my slides are getting cut off, but we're not gonna worry about it. I used a number of well-established tools to measure knowledge about marine debris and then environmental attitudes and behaviors of my students. And here you can see the results. When you compare my students, that's the right-hand side, to the control group, they had greater gains in marine debris knowledge over the course of the semester. And thank goodness, because it was a class about marine debris and I don't think I would've felt like I'd done my job if they didn't. And you can see that they did it in a way that was statistically significant. And then I'm gonna skip down to behaviors. When compared with the control group, both groups, let's say, increased their reported behavior scores over the course of the semester. My group doubles the increase of the other group, but both are statistically significant. But what's really interesting to me about this study is what I learned about environmental attitudes, because as you can see, the other group did better, if we're gonna use normative terms, than my group. And my group, though we increased a little bit, we started a little bit higher in our environmental attitudes, but we ended a little lower than the control group, which I think is fascinating, because for me, I think experiential learning, I only see the positive side of that. We're gonna go out there, we're gonna tactily engage with this problem, and we're gonna learn about it in a really deep way. And I just see that as a positive. But what if the other side of that coin is that it's a little depressing to truly understand what this problem is like when you have gone for hours to a beach with your friends and picked up thousands of pieces of plastic, hundreds of pieces of plastic, and you know that there's still more there? So for me, it's really interesting to explore that idea. Though of course, I can't make that conclusion from this one study. This was a relatively small sample size. It was a short-term observation. From this observation and this study, I really don't know what the effect is going to be in the long run for my students or the control group. Also, it's not a secret what this study was about. The students in the class knew full well that I'd been given this grant, we talked about it. They absolutely knew what I was studying. And so there could be a bias toward a perceived, preferred answer with students. And that would need to be taken into account. Also, it's not the case that I taught two versions of the same course, the Marine Debris course, one with experiential learning and one without. It was two different courses, taught by two different faculty members. And so there's some potential differences there. But I also wanna point out that they did increase, right? They did a decrease and that's a good thing. And I'm also not trying to debunk laboratory-based science learning. I hold that up as the gold standard. And for this class to do as well or maybe better, and in some cases, as that is fine by me. And I really think it's interesting to think about that relationship with attitudes and what might be happening there. And I can say that this was supported by NOAA because the idea was that it was an open-source, replicable model or someone anywhere around the country or world could not go through all the hassle right of creating this course but could just use my materials. We have a website associated with the project and come in and teach this course in their own backyard. So for me, it would be really interesting to see that happen and to understand, study those cases and understand if it's replicated, if these results are replicated around the country or around the world. And that's it, thank you. We now have some time for questions this morning. So if anybody has questions, I can see the moderators for one question. To Islanders, Brock, I was really taken with your image of the kids from the sailing team putting those bottles into the machine and then looking at Dave picking up bottles out of the harbor. You seem to have the better solution. Is that because you've got a deposit law in Massachusetts and we don't in Rhode Island? Oh, I think that's a pretty substantial motivator to say the least. But we've sort of subscribed to Rachel Miller's theories is stop it before it gets to the sea. And literally on the island, you drop something on the ground and as Dave knows, it's going into the sea. Sooner or later, one way or another in one form or another it's going there. So prevent it from happening. I just offer this as an observation and one is that we're looking at policy and legal alternatives here. One of the things that has been debated long and hard in this state is the issue of a bottle bill. And I'd really like to see it come back on the public agenda because I think that behavior which you've seen and I've seen happen in other parts of the world, it just seems perfectly obvious to me that we ought to have some sort of reward system to pick up that bottle, get to it before it gets into that storm drain and then Dave's really cool device of plucks it out of the harbor. Thanks. This question is for Dave. Dave, you mentioned the separation of the biomass and the plastics. Curious about the impact on the fauna as well, sort of hatches or other planktonic animals. Does that, are they able to escape the trap or are they accumulated as well? Yeah, we haven't seen any living organisms be removed when we remove the debris. The current that's created is so small that I think if there's a fish swim inside there, it would just swim out. So all we find is really towards the end of the life cycle macroalgae co-mingled with marine debris. I actually have a few questions for different people but I'll just go one now and maybe I can get the mic back again for Brock Callan. You may have noticed our license plates here in Rhode Island where the ocean state. And we have, as you well know, being a sailor, a tremendous amount of large events in Newport during the sailing season. What outreach is there among the various sailing communities to change the way these big events are handled? More along the way of what you're describing happens on the vineyard. Is there, is there communication between you and your organization with the big promoters here in the state of Rhode Island? To answer your first question, no, there's not enough interaction. We are getting better. I have to give a 11th hour rating we've heard about once or twice today. Huge credit for bringing those of us in the sailing business, if you will, who run large events together, discussing and sail Newport certainly knows what we're doing. Actually, when I was in San Francisco last week, David and I were there. I had the opportunity to talk with the educational officer for the Volvo. Charlie Enright was there, one of the skippers, the whole idea of how can we take, even though it was a zero waste when they were here last year, how can we take that a step further? And here's this small community that's on an island off of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We need to make that community a much larger community because more heads are better than one, to say the least, and bring in academia where we can, because I think one of the important things that we haven't done is to truly monetize what we're doing, the cost of society of all these slides, what you see in these slides, is staggering, but nobody's ever put a real number to it. And that's something we're interested in doing. So doing a better job collaborating. We're not doing enough of it. We should be doing more. The lines of communication are open. Hopefully over the next year or two we'll be doing a lot better. Hi, I'm from Maine originally, and I did a lot of derelict fishing gear work there, and I wanted to thank Sherry for your presentation. And my question, I thought the symposium was really sort of about the legalities of dealing with marine debris. There's some amazing projects that people have brought to the front here. The biggest challenge that we experience with derelict fishing gear in Maine and Massachusetts, where I work now, is the laws on the books. So can somebody address how we can change the laws on the books for handling this sort of thing? I know that the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation pulled together a panel of people to discuss two, three years ago what the challenges were in New England for dealing with derelict fishing gear, which is a huge component of marine debris in this region. And yet there hasn't been a lot of activity that I am aware of at the state house level. And I don't know if anyone in the room can speak to whether there's been progress made on defining what derelict fishing gear is in the regulations, and also enforcing what the regulations state. Thanks. Really good questions, actually. I can speak on behalf of New Hampshire and a little bit of Massachusetts in the perspective that we try and look at how our laws are written to be able to decipher, using an AG attorney general, to try and make things fit to what we wanna do. And if not, then we have a tendency to not go statutorily, but to go through rules, which the department has the option to do that without going through the legislature. And so that's a big component of working with the industry in order to be able to have them accept rules that we're gonna be moving forward from that perspective. Now, Massachusetts, Dan Kearman has been part of these conversations for this particular project, and he took our rules and was trying to see if Massachusetts can't do something with what we're doing, lipiderelict gear, more specifically with the industry. So in other words, not rewriting the regulation but going through statutorily instead? Going through rules instead of statutorily, yeah, instead of going through the legislature, which gears do slow up when you start working with the legislature, or suddenly either find a wall that you're up against or the gears will slow up for a couple years while you educate them, not just the industry that you're working with but educating them. Also, Dan or the state of Massachusetts as part of these new rail rules, say that 10 times fast. Actually, Massachusetts is like a center of rail activity at particular times of the year. And so what they have done is have said people have to remove their gear for a specific set of time and out of the water. And if there's gear in the water, then law enforcement goes in and removes that gear. So you have to deal with these sort of issues on a tiered aspect on many levels. And that's what we're trying to achieve with these partnerships and these conversations that we're having with NOAA and with the symposium and such. So any suggestions we are willing to take and see what we can't do with them also. So just keep that in mind as proponents of this issue, you guys have a lot of say with the legislatures and with your community. Just add into that, I think Tara Rollins from the, where are you? She's been, yeah, okay. From the national program also there's been really working on this issue and we're working in partnership now too and they have just released a report looking at the issues related to derelict fishing, including for example, how they're defined in various things with states. So I would just point that as an important resource for anybody that's working on or interested in this issue, it's gonna be a useful report to consider. Sea Grant is on? Yeah, and we can get you a copy. This is to Ms. Patterson. So the derelict fishing gear and ghost fishing, that concerns me and especially since it seems there's so many impediments. And you just brought up that they have to take out their gear once a year in Massachusetts. Has anybody thought of maybe identifying a week or something that you would say, this is a no fishing week and any equipment found in the water we can pull so that you could actually make it so that you could have by the rules, anybody pick up and pull gear. So any fisherman would be told, go yank your equipment. Has anybody looked at something like that or is that even feasible? So interesting that you say that, not in our waters in the Gulf of Maine, however California kind of has a free for all where if they find gear, they can bring it in and they own it. They can sell it back to the owner. I think New Hampshire would have an awful different from that through the legislature. But the state of Massachusetts again, was able to do exactly what you're describing by saying it's closed down. You get your gear out of the water and if there's anything left in the water, it's gonna be removed. Gary Powers, do we have in Rhode Island the necessary state laws and rules to solve these problems that everyone has spoken about today? And debris, moving away from your comments about abandoned vessels. And if there's time for Sherry Patterson to answer, what sort of intergovernmental relationships there are among the New England states, debris doesn't know the political jurisdictions and boundaries and how do you work that problem as well? Thank you. And there has been communication with the municipal and the state government within our state. So therefore it is a problem that we believe can be addressed in Narragansett Bay, perhaps not on the areas of the territorial waters outside of Narragansett Bay as effectively. The political associations and the state that you're talking about. Yes, sir. That's workable from your perspective. Yes, sir. The jurisdictional, outside the political jurisdictions in the water you're referring to that are things you're not addressing or am I missing something there? As to within Narragansett Bay, there is an ability for the municipalities and the state to work together to address this issue. And for example, on the derelict boat, the abandoned boat issue that I spoke to, the regulations were worked out in close, with close support of the hovermasters who are municipal, are municipally appointed and take care of the hovers within the municipalities in which they are appointed. So they've worked with us to ensure that the regulations were something that they could work with because they are the most intimately involved with what presents a problem for them and what we can do to assist them in addressing that problem. So there has been a close working relationship. In fact, there is a hovermaster and the hovermaster has to be from the city of Newport on the commission. I have a question for Kat. I'm really interested in hearing about how you selected your students for this class and whether you had more students interested in taking this course and you were able to accommodate in this class and if there's been sort of a pulse through the school about taking the class again and if you have plans to do the class again. So at the University of Hartford, most of our classes, especially for upper level students are about 18 to 22 students. And so I love me to make this a larger class because I really wanted to have those more bodies to help pick up the degree. So I've ran it as two courses in one. One was an honors seminar course and one was a politics course, but 300 level classes for juniors and seniors. But that was able, that allowed me to pull in 35 students which is a large number for the University of Hartford for any class. And I do have a lot of enthusiasm still among the students about the project. I'm teaching a different version of the class this year. We don't have the NOAA support any longer. That grant is over. So we're not doing field trips to the beach. We're doing art space projects and research projects around the topic of marine degree. And so yes, I'm doing that. And I'm also working with folks in the art history and the art school at my university and the biology program to run a series of classes around the river that runs through our campus. So it's not the exact same class, but there's a lot of enthusiasm on campus about sort of engaging with our natural environment, particularly around water resources. This is a question for Mr. Powers. The, you mentioned that several instances where the owners of these derelict vessels, abandoned vessels were actually known and discovered. Yes. Why can't an owner be held accountable for the removal of a vessel? I found that to be not the case in several instances that I've been connected to. For example, the emergency removal that DEM accomplished in June of this year, that was a vessel that was in the channel. That presented an immediate problem for the vessels that were required to use that channel. So therefore we had to remove it immediately as to the Portsmouth issue that I referenced. That there had been an attempt on numerous occasions by Portsmouth and we did not question the efforts that were extended by that town to accomplish it and they just proved unsuccessful. So therefore we thought that it would be best to take the project out before we went after the money. We thought it would be better to handle the project first then chase the money. So there's no law that says a person who abandons their vessel is still responsible for it? Oh yes, they are still responsible for it, sir. But as I said, the speed with which we can accomplish it is paramount on occasion. And sometimes it is necessary for us to address it and then go after the money. There's a reasonableness standard sometimes that's applied even in government. My question's for Dave. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you decided to put the skimmer in the certain part of Purdy Park. Like was it based on currents or anything? Was that, like did you consider currents at all or places where trash would accumulate the most or was it just convenience or I don't know? Like how you decided to pick where? It's interesting to use the word convenience. The first thing that we looked at was really just historically that that is where the trash accumulates. There's really two predominant reasons. One, there's a large stormwater outfall plate but it's also geographically. The predominant breeze is southwest and that's where, in the northeast corner is where the debris actually accumulates. But on the convenience side, I'm probably not the right word but it's an important point is that we also had to have the ability to operate and maintain the unit. So there are some places in the southern part of the harbor that we could probably put one and it would have some impact and some value as well. But the feasibility to run the unit in that place is really what is preventing us from moving one of the units to the southern part. So all of these things come into play but that's the predominant reason. From a circulation point of view, part of it seems to just move so there wasn't actually a driver. It's predominantly wind direction and stormwater outfall. Would you like to end with that and follow one more question up there? This will be the last slide, thank you. This one's for Mrs. Patterson. So if there are regulations that get in the way of commercial fishermen being able to bring in derelict gear that either is their own that has been destroyed at some point out at sea or if they've pulled up somebody else's, your cleanup crews, are they working in collaboration with the commercial fishing industry so that the industry can say, hey, it's not in our best interest for this to be in the water either but we can call somebody and report the coordinates where they can anchor it and mark it on a map so that somebody who does have the authority to bring it in can do so and dispose of it. Very good question. Yes, oftentimes what does happen with our industry and especially those that are fishing in federal waters will call in and say, we tied something off that we caught in our auto trawl, for example. They may have trawled up a trawl of lobster gear that had no buoy lines on either end. They'll call, they'll polybole it, they'll call in either NOAA, Fisheries or primarily state agencies would go out because we have a joint enforcement agreement with NOAA Fisheries, most of the state agencies do and pull up that. But there are some stakes that do allow somebody to come in with somebody else's gear as long as they call it in and say they're coming in with it. New Hampshire, no. They really like that tight rain over their personal property and they don't want it touched. So a lot of times we do get coordinates or they'll tie it off and we'll go on again. Okay, this has been a really nice discussion and the next panel is going to talk about what are some effective strategies for managing rain debris. So we can pick this up again in a few minutes. So we're gonna take a break until 4.15, so come back and we'll start. So this is our concluding panel, our final panel, where we are going to get into a lot of the questions that were posed by the woman from Maine about what are some of the laws and policy strategies that we can use moving forward. And we're really hoping to get some feedback from you on what we can look at in the future as well. So I will quickly introduce the moderator of this panel, Director Dennis Nixon. He is the director of the Rhode Island Sea Grant program and he has served in that capacity since July of 2013. In that role he leads a multimillion dollar research and education program devoted to using scientific knowledge to improve the management of Rhode Island's coast. Prior to that he served for four years as associate dean for research and administration with the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, where he was responsible for the administration of the 200 plus acre campus, the pier and the 180 foot research vessel, the endeavor. Professor Nixon served the previous eight years as the associate dean of academic affairs at the College of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. He's been a faculty member of the University of Rhode Island for the past 39 years teaching courses to many of us in the audience during that time. So with that I will turn it over to Director Nixon. It's kind of fun when the first two speakers this afternoon are former students and the person introducing me is a former student that is what we call psychic income in the professor business. So this is really great because this is at the end of a really fascinating day. These are the few, the proud, these are the Marines in here who are gonna go forward with some of the strategies we're gonna talk about in this last session. I think it's abundantly clear at this point that the problem of marine debris is something that has been created in my lifetime. And sadly as I think Sheldon pointed out to those of you students in the room, it's up to you and your lifetime to fix the problem that everyone in my generation created because we believed that man who told Dustin Hoffman your future is plastics, young man. And we took that, there's a wonderful bit of advice a little too seriously and did everything with plastic, too much with plastic. So today in this final session we're gonna talk about some strategies moving forward. It's very clear this has to be a full core press, a multi-pronged effort to address a lot of different things at once if we're going to have some impact on this incredibly important issue of what marine debris is doing to choke the world's oceans. We've gotta get going on this, it's gonna take individual action locally, town jurisdictions at the state level, it's gonna take actions by educational institutions, by NGOs, and even the private sector as we'll hear from our final sector. Everyone has to pull together on this or we will see more plastic in the ocean than fish in the ocean by 2050 and that's not something any one of us wants to be responsible for. So with that I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Kevin Cude from the State's Coastal Resources Management Council with some ideas from Rhode Island. Kevin? Thank you, Dennis. Along with a few other people in this room I think I can say it was a pleasure being one of your students. And thank you Julia for inviting CRMC as the State's Coastal Management Agency we're very, very pleased to participate in today's symposium. I hope that by the end of this very brief, I know it's the end of the day so I'll keep it brief, but I think that there are some policy opportunities to the Coastal Resources Management Council that could take us beyond a lot of the extremely good work that's already being done and so hopefully by the end of this brief presentation you'll see where we could potentially weigh in and be really helpful. So, before I discuss the Coastal Resources Management Program, which includes all of CRMC's regulations, guidelines, everything that we do is the CRMP. I'll probably refer to it as the program. But before I get into the relationship between Marie DeBri and our program I'd like to discuss the geographic scope of our jurisdictional area so you have a good feeling for just where we could exercise our authority vis a vis marine debris. So if you take a look at the map you'll see the bright yellow line along to the south of the state of Rhode Island along with a similar line around Block Island that's the state's territorial sea. CRMC has had jurisdiction over all activities in that area since its inception in 1971. And if you look at the dashed magenta colored line that's a relatively new addition to our program. I'm not gonna take the time to explain a lot of terminology you might hear but please ask afterwards if you'd like some clarification. When we were developing our ocean special area management plan, that area kind of popped out as a really important place that CRMC could exercise authority beyond the territorial sea. It applies only to federal projects. We can exercise federal consistency over proposed federal projects where if we find that it's not consistent with our program and our program had an element that addressed marine debris we can have whatever federal agency is proposing the activity modify that to address the marine debris problem. So I just want you to have a feeling for just how much of an area offshore we can exercise our authority. Now as you heading back to the shore you see Narragansett Bay heading up the bay we also have jurisdiction over Narragansett Bay all of its tributaries as far north as the dam at the Slater Mill in Pawtucket where the tidal influence of the waters of the Seacock River comes to an end up against the dam. So we cover all of that as well. And then if you take another look at the map showing Rhode Island to the far west, I'm sure you can't see but that actually says Westerly. So from Westerly over to Point Judith Narragansett you see a series of coastal salt ponds. We have jurisdiction over all those coastal salt ponds as well. And then if you continue up the coast from Point Judith Pond up would you see this long, skinny, narrow, and yes, great name, the narrow river. That's a coastal estuarine river we have jurisdiction over that water as well. So that gives you a quick look at all of the water that CRMC clearly has jurisdiction over itself. Marine debris or a problem in any of those areas could address it. So let's look at the land side of our jurisdiction. And I've got a couple of our sections of our regulations cited here. Section 100.1 in what we call the red book, the original core regulations, the cover happened to be red. So everyone knows it as the red book. Section 100.1, it defines tidal waters, shoreline features, and contiguous areas as areas where we, on the land side, exercise our jurisdiction. You already know what the tidal waters are. So what is the shoreline feature? Anywhere that you're standing on the coast of Rhode Island, you're looking at a shoreline feature. If you are in the harbor of Providence, the concrete bulkhead could be the shoreline feature. It's where the water meets the land. If you're along the cell shore of Rhode Island, you might have a dune as your coast, as your shoreline feature. That's associated with contiguous area. We have a 200 foot area that when you measure from the inland most extent of whatever the shoreline feature is, wherever you are, we have an additional 200 feet in land. So anything that happens on the land in that area, if it were to generate, or potentially generate marine debris, we can again address that through our regulatory programs. I already told you about the Salt Pond region and El River Samp regarding the water element. There's also a land element. So keep in mind with the contiguous area, we go 200 feet additionally inland from the coast. The Samps, especially our management plans, are based on watershed boundaries. Groundwater is very important in these areas, so we regulate activities to protect groundwater. So we have authority over all activities within the watersheds of these coastal salt ponds in El River. And if you take the salt ponds region, for example, that watershed boundary extends anywhere from at least a mile for about six miles inland. So you can see CRMC, certainly a lot of authority over the water, but also over the land. Finally, section 320, inland activities and alterations. That is really activity-based. They tend to be large-scale industrial projects, power-generating plants, petroleum, processing, storage, whatever the case may be. You see the list of them below that. We can exercise our authority anywhere in the state. It's far away from the coast, as you could imagine. I mean, if someone were to propose a power plant in Borreville, say, and there was some way, however unimaginable it might seem, if there was some way that that project could have an impact on the coastal resources of the state of Rhode Island, including marine debris, CRMC is in a position to legally review that proposal and require that any impacts be addressed. So I just wanted to give you a good idea as to the geographic scope of our jurisdiction, because I think that's important in a couple of minutes. So let's talk a little bit about marine debris and the Wurrana Coastal Resources Management Program. Unlike DEM where they have direct authority to remove marine debris, you know, vessels, we don't really approach it in that manner. We could. I've highlighted marine debris in that list of categories of activities under the Coastal Zone Management Act, section 309 enhancement grants. CRMC receives funding every year to implement our programs, but it's an additional source of funding specific to these categories. Section 309 provides that funding if a state Coastal Resources Management Agency wishes to further emphasize any of these areas of activities beyond our normal operating procedures. We have never really prioritized marine debris as one of our highest issues and a couple of reasons for that. When we engage in the process of section 309 enhancement grants, what would we like to focus on? We don't do that in a vacuum. We have a pretty large group of stakeholders, Coastal municipalities, the State of the Bay, Audubon, Conservation Law Foundation, the Wurrana Builders Association, and Wurrana Shell Fisherman's Association among others. We all collectively decide what do we think the state's real priorities are? We have an opportunity here to go beyond our normal programmatic activities and we've always had special area management planning really pop out as the top issue that folks would like to see us work on under 309. Wetlands and coastal hazards have always been, historically, ranked highly, and I threw in on the bottom, Wurrana General 46236, that's CRMC's original enabling legislation we were created by the General Assembly in 71. The resource development plan amended that law to really have CRMC emphasize our planning functions, we've been long known as a permitting agency, a regulatory agency, and we are, we do have that function, but we really hadn't necessarily used our planning functions as much as we have our regulatory functions in the past and we really made up for lost time with all the special area management plans we were working on. That MRDP really directed, that's the General Assembly directing a state agency to really focus on special area management plans. The way I heard it put, the charge was blanket the state with special area management plans and we've done so and it's still in the process. So it's not as though we have some kind of a conspiracy against emphasizing marine debris, we really are focusing more on those high priority issues that we've long established, but I just want you to know, think about the geographic scope of our jurisdiction and the fact that these 309 enhancement grant programs exist, we could, we could treat marine debris as a stand alone issue and what I don't call a social resource management program. So the way I see this with everything I've heard today, consider the blank slate. Honestly, I don't see CRMC picking up marine debris as another one of our priority issues in the near future, but if there were a group of people, I don't know, maybe in this room, who really wanted to see a comprehensive marine, excuse me, marine debris program developed, here's an opportunity. So I just wanted folks to know that that is there. And then finally, it was great to hear so many different people talk about prevention. I wanted to just give you a few elements of our Coastal Resource Management Program where I believe we do have a combination of regulations that are meant to prevent marine debris in the first place. And then there were some authorities for removal as well. So in Harbor Management Plans, you'd heard a lot about coastal municipalities from Gary Powers. They can develop a Harbor Management Plan whereby CRMC essentially confers state authority, these are state waters, to a municipality as long as that plan is consistent with CRMC's program. And one thing we do require, anytime a municipality has waterfront property that is utilized by the boating community in any capacity, we require that whatever type of trash can be generated through the boating activities, there have to be land side facilities to accommodate whatever could be generated. I'd like to hope that there's a two-pronged benefit to that in the first place if a boater knows when I come back to the shore, there are facilities for me to properly dispose of my trash that would otherwise be marine debris. And hopefully that encourages them not to throw it overboard when they're out there. So there's that element. Regarding marina standards, we require that materials that are specifically designed for marine purposes be used in all structures. We also require, for instance, any buoyant components of a marina's dock facilities. They'd be completely encapsulated to impact resistant plastic. So the hope is that if there's a storm event, you're not going to see, in our case, in the state of Rhode Island, thousands of chunks of styrofoam-like block floating all over the place. That's another measure that we hope is actually preventing marine debris. Also applies to residential docks and recreational facilities. We require the removal of any structures damaged by storms or human mediated events, whatever the cause may be. And then again, you can see that floats and ramps. Some people would find it convenient to just, in the off-season, just put your floats on the shore. No, no, you can't do that. So it's another means by which we try to prevent what could easily trigger marine debris from never becoming that in the first place. And then finally, a little bit about aquaculture. As I assume, folks are at least passing awareness that aquaculture is booming in the state of Rhode Island. My understanding is that the farm gate value of oysters, the chief species culture in Rhode Island, has already surpassed the value of the wild fishery for Kohogs. So great, in my opinion, it's great that we're bringing a new industry to bear, but think about the potential for marine debris with the thousands and thousands of extruded plastic Vexar bags that are used to grow out oysters. All sorts of other structures are used. Aquaculture is not one trick pony. There are many, many different types of aquaculture operations, all of which can contribute significant amounts of marine debris. So anytime our executive director, Grover Fugate, would see an aquaculture facility in disrepair, derelict condition, he can order the removal. So get it out as soon as we see that it could be a problem. And then finally, an Ascent Holder, Serum sees a word for permit, Ascent Holder, lease holder. You also have to have a lease if you're an aquaculturist in Rhode Island, where we lease out the bottom lands. 90 days of station of operations for whatever cause, you have to restore the area back to the original condition, take everything out. And then finally, we can require a performance bond to ensure that derelict, what would become derelict equipment is in fact removed. So that's really all I really wanted to talk about today just to show you that while we're not necessarily the leader in marine debris, we're well aware of it. And through our regulatory authority, we do try to address the potential for marine debris, recognize where our permitting processes are potentially creating opportunities for marine debris and we try to address it in our regulations. So I think that's about it. And thank you so much for having us. Presentation kept in the areas and area where marine debris might enter into the CNRCs, thinking a little bit more seriously. And that says, we've seen that, as you mentioned, the oyster production going up dramatically. But as we saw in some of the slides this morning, filter feeders take in a small piece of plastic. And as the Bay's aquaculture industry expands, those filter feeders could be filtering pieces, very small pieces of plastic, growing here against the Bay. So I would want to say that marine debris may actually rise in priority for the CNRC simply because we cannot have oyster aquaculture growing dramatically, while small amounts of plastic are increasing in the Bay as well. So that's a really big issue that I hope you take back to the Council. Our next speaker is an old friend of former student assistant professor, Aaron Bryant, who works at the Sea Education Association, which is a great outfit in Woods Hole that I've been associated with for many years and sailed about a thousand miles on the various ships operated by them. But SCA has been in the vanguard of going to those places in the world where you would be least likely to find debris and yet has come up with some remarkable results. And I'll let you tell the audience all about those. Professor Bryant. Hi, first I want to thank Roger Williams University for providing me and many other students so many experiential learning opportunities. And I'm very happy to be working for another institution that is so focused on experiential learning for college students. So C semester, Sea Education Association semester, a broad program offers, has offered over 8,000 students now over the last 45 years the opportunity to go to sea to design their own oceanography projects. And in the last decade, to design their own social science projects as well that they can investigate during port stops in various parts of the world. You see, and you'll, let's see. Here is one of our oceanographic vessels. In the Pacific, we have another in the Atlantic. So the students and the scientists who work with them on the vessels have noticed over the past several decades a pattern of ocean plastics presence in the places where they sail. So this is what I'm gonna tell you about this list here. But how did we find this marine plastic? Well, we drag this net, which is a meter wide at the mouth for one nautical mile twice a day, every day, for most of every year for the past several decades. And we find something like this coming out of each net toe. The equivalent of dragging a net through about 2,000 bathtubs of water. And this is what we come up with, these microplastic bits. And so maybe we have 250 plastic pieces in this sieve, this filter. And that translates to about 130,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer, which is pretty standard amount, which is horrible, might say that. Here is a depiction on a map of some of the places we have gone very many times. So the warmer colors show higher concentrations of plastic, microplastics. The cooler colors show areas of less dense concentration of plastic. There was one cruise that was dedicated just to plastics debris investigations in 2010. And you can see the zigzag line cruise track there. They were trying to get to the other edge of the high area of high plastics concentration in the North Atlantic gyre. And they didn't get there. They had a month to get there and they just never found the other edge of the high concentration area. And you can see the green shows you a place where the net toes indicate a concentration of 26 million pieces of plastic per square kilometer. Here's why we care. We've talked about marine organisms ingesting plastics all day. I'm not gonna beat a dead fish any longer. But another area of study that SEA and others in the Woods Hole Science Mecca community have been studying and others as well elsewhere is the presence of microorganisms on floating plastics. And the fact that microorganisms are microbes are found in these pits on the surface of floating microplastics and other sized plastics at sea. And we're not sure at this point whether those organisms are degrading those pits that they're living inside of mechanically or whether they're ingesting, metabolizing the plastic itself. But it's an interesting question. One of many in the field of marine debris for scientists to look at. So where is it coming from? We've also been talking about this all year, all day for years now. Here's a picture of the Los Angeles River. So we understand land-based sources of marine debris a little better because of the 2015 Jambeck et al paper, the et al in the journal Science. The et al includes one of SEA's favorite marine debris oceanographers, Kara Lavender Law. So this is a product of some of SEA's work. This understanding that we have that marine debris comes from land-based sources in the amount of eight million metric tons per year. Dr. Whitehouse, I think it was, mentioned that 80% of marine debris comes from land-based sources and 20% comes from ocean-based sources. But we should stay tuned because SEA and others are looking more closely at the ocean sources of marine debris right now. So maybe that 20% number will rise, we'll see. Okay, but I want to talk today about a project we're happy and lucky to have funded by the NOAA Marine Debris program. And we're calling it the Super Project. We, it's the Single Use Plastics Reduction Project that SEA and some community collaborators from the town of Falmouth are working on together. You see some of my collaborators, some of my favorite collaborators on the screen right now. These are fifth graders. They started a group that they call Skip the Straw. This is the definition of a grassroots organization right here. They needed an umbrella organization of 501C3 organization to work with. So the Falmouth Water Stewards agreed to collaborate with them and we collaborate with both of these groups. But these students in the public schools in Falmouth are simply put outraged at the fact that we have placed all of this debris in the oceans that we are handing over to them. I think that says it in a nutshell. So they go to community events. They talk in the schools about things that a fifth grader can do about marine debris. They participate in beach cleanups like crazy. They have gone around to restaurants in the area and asked management to stop serving straws with drinks, except upon demand. And to have, and this is something that SEA students interestingly were doing, were investigating in parallel, not knowing it at the time that these fifth graders were out there on the streets as well. So C semester students surveyed a number of restaurants and other food vendors in Falmouth to discover the interest level in addressing marine debris sources and found that many, a surprising number actually, were willing to participate in a program like this, which is similar to what these public school students found as well. So we decided that we should do more studies on local will to reduce single use plastics usage. And we also decided that we wanted to figure out how to use the executive order that came out was signed last December, I think it was, by the president that said, we need to be using behavioral science to better serve the American people. And so this is a directive for agencies to use behavioral science. And we decided that we were interested in social norms theory. And one great example of the use of social norm theory in a business setting is maybe you've gone to a hotel and you've seen on the counter in the bathroom of your hotel room, a little sign that says, please reuse your towel. If you have, if you reuse it, if you want to reuse it, put it on the rack, right? If you don't want to, if you'd like it laundered, leave it on the floor. And here are some reasons why this is a good idea. So there was a study done about this practice and it was discovered that if you have a sign in your bathroom, in the hotel room, that says 78% of the people who use this room reuse their towel and then it, that's basically all it said. Put it on the rack if you want to reuse, put it on the floor if you don't. More guests were likely to reuse their towel than if you said on your sign, please reuse your towel. It saves electricity and water, et cetera, great reasons. So the former sign gets a better buy-in from your guests than the latter. So it's more effective to say, well, lots of people are doing this than to say, this is why it's a good idea intellectually. We don't vote with our heads, we've noticed this. Another example. So SCA students now, just starting this fall, have been taking before and after surveys on environmental attitudes and their understanding of marine debris and their single-use plastic usage habits before a sea semester and after. So we look forward to being able to present those results. We also are building an archive of, an annotated bibliography really of studies that investigate social norm theory applied to environmental resource use situations. How are scientists able to affect the policymaking process? I think that this requires people with various skill sets to do the various parts of this process. And really it's a cycle. Adaptive management requires you to try something based on the best available science and then monitor the results and adjust as necessary. So I think we're somewhere in steps one, two, three, at sea semester. Although we have, I mentioned her already, Kara Lavender-Lah has just gone to an interim meeting convened by the German Minister of the Environment. And I say it's an interim meeting because it's between a G7 meeting during a period when Germany held the presidency of the G7, the group of seven and the time when Germany will assume the presidency of the G20. So Germany has successfully got Marine litter on the agenda for the G7 and is now looking to convince the G20 so a slightly larger group of world financial powers to take up this issue as well. And so I think that sort of works. So this is a scientist who is invited to this international financial meeting to talk about her work and her recommendations. I think all of these, we've already talked about FADs today and fishing gear dumping. And apparently some dumping of fishing gear is very much intentional and happens because a fisherman will, a fishing vessel will take on so much fish that they are at their weight limit and so they need to get rid of some weight and it's more cost effective to throw gear than to throw fish. So that apparently happens. I just wanted to give you a couple more numbers from preliminary results that I came at to talk about 640,000 tons of fishing gear being dumped per year versus very much smaller amounts of plastic coming from certain other industries. So I was talking with Kara about this G7 G20 interim meeting and she said, really you need to think about your audience. And so is your audience more concerned with the health of sea turtles or are they concerned with the health of coastal communities? So a developing country is not necessarily going to want to hear you talk about the poor sea turtles. They're gonna wanna hear about what can you do to help us with waste management and with meeting citizens basic needs. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. The sea turtles won't kill you, so I guess just wanna relate to the last week I was on the grant that you had for helping them evaluate grant given after deep water rising with that maybe oil spill warning. And one of the researchers was a prominent sea turtle researcher whose job was to figure out where the turtles went and she learned a lot about putting the GPS transmitters on the gluing them on the turtle shell and they followed them from the nests in the Gulf of Mexico out in the loop current of the gulf around the tip of Florida, up to Hatteras following Gulf Stream looping in the sargassum and then coming back, very cool. And so the idea was we'll lay it back to the oil spill happens. So she did both blood samples which are fairly common in turtle research but for the first time did stool samples as well. And much to her shock and surprise, the stool was completely filled full of plastic. And subsequently now she is looking for funding to go approach Noah who is the custodian of 400 turtles that were victims of stranding and are in the freezer somewhere and duty cropsies on those 400 sea turtles to see it. Indeed, they didn't just get old and get confused but perhaps they were like the one described in the film of plastic ocean. So full of plastic that they could no longer submerge and that's just really shocking. But anyway, on to our next speaker, Jamie Rhodes, the program director for Upstream Policy Institute. Jamie, thank you. All right, thank you all very much. Which ones do I use? I assume that one. Oh, those are the ones. Nope. That one, okay. So my name is Jamie Rhodes. I'm the program director for Upstream Policy Institute. Also happened to be a Roger Williams alum of 2012. And it's a really interesting story I could tell you some other time about how the last four years ended up with me coming right back here and talking about plastic. I like to call it plastic pollution. I don't usually use the term marine debris anymore so I apologize. I'm gonna say plastic pollution throughout my presentation just so you know that that's how I have internalized and described what we are working on here. So the organization I work for is formerly called the Product Policy Institute. We work on policy development as well as political and grassroots engagement on the issues that we primarily focus on right now are advancing sustainability, ending plastic pollution, and reducing climate disruption. Primarily through the lens of the products and the packaging that we interact with on a day-to-day basis, which turns out is a completely fascinating area of both lack of policy and lack of critical thinking, I would say in our public policy environment. So we are a C3 organization. We're primarily foundation and funder driven and that gives us a lot of freedom to be a little bit of free thinkers and somewhat crazy in our ideas, some of which I'll present to you here and let you know why they're not crazy at all. Right now we have staff in Rhode Island in Maine, although I've had the distinct pleasure as well as pain in working in legislatures across the country on policies that deal with packaging and packaging regulations. And though I didn't get a chance to put it up here now, there is a movement that we have sought to build here in the United States called Break Free from Plastic. You all can see it, breakfreefromplastic.org. It's an effort to build a global movement in how to address plastic pollution. So the next slide here, I'm actually going to skip because we've talked enough about the problem. I'm not here to talk about the problems. We had a number of wonderful people here to do it. This is one of the first reports about as much plastic in the ocean as fish and I'm not going to spend any more talking about that. But I do have just a couple slides and to say what is our organization seeking to do about it? And we've identified plastic pollution as one of those. It's like the in-your-face realization that our inability to address the issue of how we have rapidly moved to plastic is becoming manifest in the environment. Like the two concepts that we have most sought to engage upon are these ones here, circular economy, extended producer responsibility. I did not plant the question early this morning of someone who brought up extended producer responsibility to Dr. Whitehouse, though I talked to him afterwards and I gave him a hearty handshake, a high five and said, thank you for doing my work for me. I really appreciate it. So these are just definitions. But what I want to talk about is why we work on this and what does it mean to do so? And we've had a lot of discussions so far today about the personal responsibility that we have about making different decisions around the materials we use, not using single-use plastics and working towards our own responsibilities and implications for the global problem that is plastic pollution as we see it. I don't believe that we can personal responsibility our way out of this. I don't think it is in the ability of the population of the developed world or the developing world for us to say, I myself can make enough personal decisions to impact this. Yes, we can impact it, but we can't solve it. We can't stop it. The way I like to think about it is that archeologists 1,000 years from now, I hope when they do like core samples and archeological digs, they're going to see this little layer of plastic that we're never going to get rid of. And they look at it and go, I'm really glad that didn't keep going. Thank God someone stepped up and they decided to stop doing that because that would have choked our entire ecological system. So our view is that, and it's in our name, the solutions to these issues are further upstream than the consumer decisions that we make and consumer behavior. We have to go further upstream the entire product and the product and packaging chain in order for us to make a decision. And for example, our post-consumer materials collection systems are unable to deal with the rapidly changing material streams that we have. We're not using aluminum and glass and paper and cardboard anymore. We are moving more quickly to plastic films, plastic wraps, what I like to call low value materials that make these systems no longer sustainable. Our recycling systems, they used to be primarily funded by the sale of the material. It's valuable. You can sell aluminum, you can turn back into aluminum. It's a commodity. The more of the material that moves into these flexible plastic pouches and the multi-material pouches that are almost all polyethylene and some other version of that that I'm not a chemist and I don't even want to go down that path is essentially rendering our existing like post-consumer operating systems completely financially like insolvent. They're requiring further and further like economic subsidies from the public sector. The concept behind the circular economy extended producer responsibilities to say the companies and the manufacturers that are putting this material into our market, their responsibility doesn't end when I buy their product. It doesn't end when I buy their packaging. The impacts of their decisions to package their products in the way they do has a cascading effect on our economy and have a cascading effect on our environment. And that impact needs to be brought in to what they do. They need to be cognizant of it and responsible for what that impact is going to be. And so EPR, extended producer responsibility is that foundational way to do that and say that these full costs need to be associated with the products that we purchase. When I buy a piece of, like when I buy a plastic water bottle, I should be investing in the system that's designed to take that water bottle after I'm done with it, recycle it, pelletize it, melt it down, and turn it back into a new bottle. I should be investing in that system. But right now, when I buy that bottle, I then choose my taxpayer dollars to build that system. I'm a very pro-government person. I'm crazy lefty, I'm liberal, I go government can solve lots of problems, but you know what municipal governments can't do? Play on an international commodities markets that are built upon the recycling collection they have. Just not their strong suits, all right? Now the materials manufacturers that are deciding to package their products in this, they happen to be already existing global players on this. They are in the best position to understand what needs to be done post-consumer in order for them to have pre-consumer recycled content. The cycle needs to be closed and not have this arbitrary distinction between me as a consumer, when I buy the product, I'm paying one person to design it and sell it to me and market it to me, ship it to me, and sell it to me. And then I have to pay my taxes for this other post-consumer system that's supposed to be communicating with that one and bring materials back into it, and that is not what we have anymore, really at all. And so I talk about extended producer responsibility because I've been running a bill here in Rhode Island for about five years now to actually establish it, make Rhode Island the first state to do so. Interestingly enough, of all the OECD countries, the United States is the only one that doesn't do this. It is the most prevalent packaging regulation in the entire world, Russia, does it? Chile just started doing it, the entire European Union, it's done by the Canadian ministers, have an agreement to do it, except for the United States. We're the only ones who don't embrace it. The same companies that are selling us our material have embraced this policy in the rest of the world and say it's a cornerstone of their sustainability efforts. They fight it tooth and nail here. I can be cynical and I can talk about why, but let's go have a drink afterwards, all right? Let's save it for that. So I've been working on this proposal in Rhode Island. There is movement in Connecticut and California, Minnesota, and even in North Carolina, there was even a proposal in Indiana this last year. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, and it needs to be done in a way that is uniquely American, uniquely united, built on our federalized system. The key though is that if we want to have infrastructure in place to prevent further plastic being released into the environment from, say, the United States, you need to have all the players in, and we can't rely on public subsidies to build this system. Those that are profiting off of it need to be invested in making sure this happens, and as the public, we've decided that plastic pollution is a problem, we need to make sure that the companies that are deciding to use plastic packaging are, in fact, invested in solving it. So that's one. Don't worry, I only have two more slides. Okay. So the other project that we're working on is called Beyond the Ban. So here's my idea. This is my crazy idea, and luckily, the Urban Sustainability Director's Network bought it. And let's see if I can actually deliver on it. Cities are that focal point of where, like our waste system is falling down and not working, but it's also the place where consumers, residents, taxpayers are interacting with it at the city level. Our cities are responsible right now for managing or preventing essentially plastic pollution in the United States. They're also the ones that are making interesting policy these days. And so we are working with 10 cities across North America to do the data collection research as to what are the policies, community engagement, outreach programs that they have in place right now that prevent plastic pollution? We're doing a study of are they effective, what data has been collected to determine if they're effective, is effective even the right term to determine, to describe why they are doing it, or was it done for completely different reasons? And then to bring, we're bringing them together actually here in Providence. Thank you for the Marine Affairs Institute for helping us host this in December to talk about where do we go from here? Because I also, sure I support a plastic bag ban, but it's not gonna solve the problem. I mean, let's just be honest here. We can't product ban our way out of this either. We need a more comprehensive set of priorities. And we actually have to set priorities of what are we trying to accomplish with these? And how can I bring some of the most strategic thinkers as well as ambitious cities into the conversation to say, where do we wanna go from here? So we're on a 12 month process of six months of doing the research and conversations with city specific policy makers and staff, and then we're gonna do six months trying to pilot programs in Providence, San Francisco, and Surrey, British Columbia. And British Columbia is on there, you may go, what, which one of these is not like the other, it's because they have a producer responsibility system in place. They're doing it already. And so we wanna be able to compare what type of policies and the effectiveness in a jurisdiction that's already having manufacturers pay for as fund, pay for and operate the post-consumer processing system that's needed to keep plastic out of the environment. And what's happening in the United States where that's not occurring. So one question I always have is when I talk about this is, what are we, what should our focal point be? Where should we be spending our time and energy? And so, oh that good, that did turn out well. This is actually a report I wanna thank Clean Production Action, the Surfrider Foundation, as well as the Five Gyres Institute for helping us release this report actually yesterday. So this will spend up a lot of my time. What we have attempted to do, and this is a beta version of a report and you can find it on our website, upstreampolicy.org, it's right up there, it's number one, we just put it up there. The idea is to say if we are spending our time working on plastic pollution related issues, what should we be targeting? What should we be working on and why? So we are right now, this is a beta version of what we are calling a three vector analysis of the impact of plastic so that we can determine where should our time and energy be spent. We can go through all of this. God, there's a lot of text on colors up there. I feel like I need a little map to go through it. But the concept of this is that three vectors we're looking at are contamination rates. How much of this type of plastic is contaminating systems that are not designed for it? That could be ecological systems, economic systems, collection systems. Where is this stuff getting out to? And how prevalent is it? What's the toxicity level of the material that is getting out? Is it harmful to the environment? Is it harmful to human consumption? How so and why? And then the last one is collection rates. Is this a material that is effectively being collected and why? And so by ban list, as you can see, it's better alternatives now. The idea being is where are we using plastic where there are already readily available alternatives that don't pose the same threats to plastic. And so I kind of cut this off at the 6%. It keeps going down a little bit, but the idea here being is that we aggregated data from the international coastal cleanup, Litterati, the marine debris tracker, and the San Diego Coast Keeper. This is all California data right now because they happen to have a referendum next Tuesday about whether to maintain a plastic bag band. So we decided to focus our first data set where it would be politically useful. So we aggregated that data and did this analysis as well as alternative analysis that we compiled into this report. We're hoping that we can take this methodology, we put it out there, get the feedback, see who likes it, see who doesn't, see how we can improve on it, and determine whether this can be applied in other regions both in the United States as well as across the world as far as focusing where we need to, the highest priority issues. Now one really interesting note about the ban list concept here and what we're doing is that those data sets that we're looking at they look at material types and usage, but there's a key piece of data that they're not using that would make all the difference of the world to me. And that's brands. Who's stuff is getting out there? Not what stuff, but who's? Because if we want to kind of go back and say we need to go further upstream and say let's get a full set of decision makers and actors into this question of how do we prevent this? I think we gotta go back to brands. Now this is one area where I thank both Dr. Whitehouse and Senator Whitehouse and the work that they're doing, but this is an area where my organization and the ones that even I cite up there have significantly disagreed with the ocean conservancy. And that is primarily that one, brands have a primary role in understanding and being participant in the solutions to this. The material that as was cited, the material that's getting out into the oceans is primarily not coming from North America. It's not coming from Europe. It's coming from nations where we don't have the collection infrastructure. And it's happening because we have companies that are based here selling their products there with the material that's designed for here, well, somewhat designed for here. And they need to be part of the solution as well as preventing it in those nations and in those jurisdictions where we don't have a full system. And so that's one of the reasons why we want brand data on this is that we need to identify who the actors are that are participating in this. And as far as solutions go, is that within the nations, even in the US as well as in developing economies, the solutions to it need to be less top-down and say, let's just build more infrastructure. It needs to be community-driven. How do we solve this at the local level? How do we build not just the infrastructure to dispose of this material, but to prevent the pollution itself? And I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, that was really fascinating. And we wish you the best of luck. Nobody's recovery system was listed for one product there, cigarette butts. But I'd like you to hold on that thought until you hear out our next speaker. My bro is from Urban Care, a private company that's going to address one of the most pervasive forms of marine pollution we're dealing with every day. Mike, take it away. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Goes forward, right goes forward. Hi, is that good? Hi, my name is Mike, I'm from Portland, Maine. About four years ago, we started a program called the Sidewalk Butler. Basically, the genesis of it was, I get a notice from the city. Being a not really like to play with city kind of guy, I had a coffee shop at the time. We decided, well, the notice said that we had to clean up the cigarette butts out in front of our store. Being a responsible store owner, we go out and sweep them up every morning to get rid of the stuff. So we decided to have some fun with it with some of the group of the regulars, and we put a nickel bounty on cigarette butts. It was, after thinking about it, it was really stupid because it's a lot of money. However, it proved a point very quickly. Portland Press, Harold picked it up and they ran the story. And two days later, we had an excess of 26,000 cigarette butts at our front door. These guys were coming in with bags of these. They wanted to buy cars with the amount of money that they thought they were gonna get. Sadly, thought about being Uncle Sam, we only had $320 that we had raised to our thing, so it's very disappointed, folks. Although we gave everybody 20 bucks, we took some money out of the tail and they were happy and everybody was cool. But it got me to thinking, it's really, really stupid to try to pay people to do the right thing. You have to make it convenient for them. So I got to thinking about it when I was a kid. Both of my parents smoked. In an auditorium like this, there'd be an ashtray, at least three of them on every table there. Everyone would, this would be a few years ago, of course. But we didn't have the problem 25, 30 years ago. Since people, smokers have been pushed from outside out onto the sidewalks, there's been no accommodation for the cigarettes. And, of course, they wind up on the street in New Year Bay. Everybody's Bay the whole bit, they catch fire. So I went home with my son and we built something called a sidewalk butler. And this is the latest model, this is our seventh iteration. The first one was made out of steel, it was very heavy, very expensive, et cetera, et cetera. But these, I'm gonna back up just a second here, see. Can you hear me okay? Oh, good. These are mounted, actually Bristol has 15 of these in town, which I was looking at them last night. It was kind of nice. These are mounted on poles and posts where people actually walk, smoke, drink, et cetera. They're there. What happens with these, you can put your cigarette inside of here. This will hold about 350 of them after a fashion. Once it's full, you wanna lock it. There's a cylinder inside here, becomes a no touch, no problem method of recycling, actually. We work with a company called TerraCycle. Most of you have probably heard of them. They're in Trenton, New Jersey. TerraCycle is one of the only companies that will actually recycle cigarette butts. You ask how, I'm pretty sure what happens. The filters are all made out of plastic. We've been talking about plastic all day. And as I'm sure you know, cigarette butts are about 38% of what's found on the beaches in every pickup anywhere. So we have a way to get rid of them. With TerraCycle, they melt down the plastics, they turn into pallets, rare road ties, things like that. The organics are composted out. So basically once a cigarette butt gets in one of these units, that's the end of the road for it. This is like the Yucca Mountain. They never come out again. But what we've done with these, thank you, what we've been able to do with this, we're in the process of creating the first, the world's first database of cigarette butts and where they are. Our units, this is just a mock-up here because I didn't have one handy the other morning. There's an RFID tag that's attached to it. This allows you to track where they are. The operator takes his Android phone because that's Android's the only one that does the RFIDs, taps it, puts a time and date stamp as to when the operator is there. It also develops a dropdown menu. You can say is it half full, three quarters full, et cetera, et cetera. Those numbers correspond on the back end and actual numbers. We've developed an app, excuse me. That's part of this program. I should be running the, let me talk this field on it. That if you're a sponsor, you've got access to the widget and it updates it every five minutes and tells you exactly how many cigarette butts your account is on that. That's really, really pretty cool. Our goal is, the first one we built was very heavy and it worked beautifully. However, these have to be everywhere. We'd like to see them about every 30 feet. Generally winds up where poles and posts or light posts are. Smokers generally will not walk more than 30 feet without withholding a butt. They'll get rid of it and it's just, but everybody says, oh, that's terrible, that's terrible, that's very, very true. However, in Portland right now, we're approaching our one millionth cigarette butt that we've been able to collect in the last two years out of just 200 of them butlers. In the first year, there was only 80 of them. So before we demonize the smokers, I think give them a chance. If there's something available, they will use it. We've got over almost a million examples of them doing the right thing and then I'll go through this and see if this works. Oh, I've done all this. Yeah, I know. The nice thing about this, mentioned earlier about doing the work, we have to be able to pay for them. We're not an NGO, we're definitely a cash flow business. We work with sponsors who sponsored the sites of this, DeMillo's on the side of this. This is a restaurant in Portland. They've been around forever. They're right on the waterfront. Steve, I showed it to him, he goes, give me a bunch. He got it right away because his business is right on the water, it requires his logo as the freshest seafood starts with clean water and that's very, very true. The other one on this side, I kicked this one around. These are my trash trams. Bunch of sweet old ladies up in Montpelier, Vermont who at the end of the day, they go out and pick up trash, things like that. They ordered some, it works out beautifully. So we mentioned grass roots, we're seed roots. We're just sprouts. But the nice thing about it, I'm reading it off here, tamper proof, easy to maintain. They don't problem, there's no issues with sweepings, plowing, we haven't lost any of these to any weather related, no thefts. Actually the only two that we have lost were in Portland when they were digging up the sidewalks. So we guys put them on the back of the truck, I go over, where the hell's my butler? I go, the truck, I don't know where it is. So we lost those two. These are the facts, blah, blah, blah. These are good for 20 years. We warranty them for 20 years. They're all aluminum. We live and work in the shadow of L.L. Bean. They do lifetime, we're 20 years. I'm the, they're much bigger than we are. I was talking to somebody earlier about the non-profits. We've developed a program, from what I understand, again, we're not a non-profit. We're scrapping for every buck. Most of their time is spent trying to raise money. This turns into an evergreen for non-profit. You've already got your database of your contributors. These are a hundred bucks apiece. You sell them for $200. We get paid our money. The next year, you resell the sponsorship for $100. Every year they keep going. It works out beautifully. It's like on public TV. They're still selling Peter Paul and Mary tapes and how long have those been? God, this is much better. This is much better. Plus, on this, if just 100 people a day walk by this, your cost per view is 0.002 cents. I challenge any radio station to come anywhere near that. Spontyard, blah, blah, blah. We're a vendor with Keep America Beautiful. They like what we're doing. I just told you about this. Blah, blah, blah. A, that's me. Sidewalk Butler, B-U-T-T-L-E-R dot com. That's a website. So obviously, I'm not a professional speaker. Enthusiastic, but not professional. We have a couple of moments for Q&A. And I will actually take not moderator's privilege. I will step in and ask a question of Mike. Because we were talking about the Sidewalk Butler earlier this week. And I'm just curious how you went about getting the city to agree to put the butlers out if you encountered any hurdles with that? Resistance hurdles? Well, to be honest with you, I'm very strict with you. It's true. Anybody here work for the city? Good, good, good question. Probably not Florida. Yeah. City worker, city, if they go like this and say no, nothing's going to change. The least amount they do, if they put themselves out, there's a chance they're going to get cut off. Nobody wants to take a chance. You've got to make it happen. The first ones, I had eight of them out initially. And we picked up tons of them. I put out another 25 after that. We picked up seven five-gallon pails full of and I literally brought those down the city hall. I couldn't throw it out of the mayor's office twice. The lady that was here earlier, she was talking about the arrogant Greeks. I'm the pain in the ass Greek. This is something that's, you know, we don't make a lot of money out of it, gives us jobs, all of this stuff, but work passion is overused. Enthusiastic is much better because I'm just, I mean, you put them on the ground, the grains, they go away, they're in the bay, where do you go? You're sweeper, soccer, pulse them up, you know, you get a chance to count them all over again. Short circuit the whole program. Put them in there in the first place, then they're gone forever. Just make it simple. And it works. And like I said, I get a million examples in four lines. Great, thank you. Do we have questions from the audience? We have time for a few. I have 1,000 questions. I wish this were a longer symposium. It's an excellent symposium and thank you for not serving single use water bottles at your symposium. The question I have is about toxic waste and whether plastic has been considered as part of that definition because I think there was some conversation about that a couple years ago. Does anybody in the room know about whether plastic can be regulated as toxic waste as was proposed, I think three or four years ago by some folks who work in California. Does that ring any bells to anybody? I think it's still, I think there are still folks that are pushing for it to be regulated that way. But I don't think that the effective argument has been made to regulate it that way. But that is something that we can add to our list of potential things to look into, which is what we as the Marine Affairs Institute are hoping to get out of this. So thank you for that. Another question. About the cigarette butlers, I'm wondering if you thought about giving those to individuals or selling them to individuals and allowing them to have like a program where they recycle their own, because I know at least a couple people who discard their cigarettes on the ground at their own home on their boat. I'm wondering if that would be worthwhile. Absolutely. We make no distinction on who we take our money from. I've got individuals, I've got apartment owners, we sell somewhat to the city. A lot of restaurants in Portland have taken the initiative, not only Steve but other ones. Some want their logos on the side. We do all our printing in-house so we can do on-demand. We're doing an installation in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. In a couple of weeks or so. They've got 33 sponsors, each one will be individually sponsored so we can do stuff like that. So I've got apartment owners that just buy one. Yeah, so we go from one to 500 if you want, I mean, it's okay, we just want them out there. Kevin Q, you made what I think is a very interesting comment about CRMC could look at a time when marine debris is a standalone issue. What would it take to have it be that? And do you think CRMC is an appropriate agency to address those issues in Rhode Island? And if you do think it's an appropriate agency, what would CRMC do? Can you imagine that? Sure, please be similar to the same way that we make our decisions now as to what our section 309 enhancement projects will be. We rely heavily on stakeholder input and I think we would need input from the public, interested groups, NGOs. There's a wealth of organizations in here today that I didn't even know existed. And if a symposium like this could be a forum within which people could communicate with each other, make a good argument to CRMC that we should raise marine debris to a higher priority level. We would certainly listen to that. There's no question. How would we do it? Honestly, I really don't know. I don't know how we would manage the problem. I mean, Dennis happened to mention in passing a moment ago the, you know, here we are promoting aquaculture and filter feeders are taking in all sorts of small bits of plastic. Is that going to impact the industry? Is it? Maybe there's a motivator there for the industry to get involved. So I don't have a, you know, point A to point B answer for you but I think it's extremely important to have a coalition of interested folks who can present CRMC with extremely defensible arguments that should be a higher priority. Hi, yeah, I have another question about the Butler. Maybe I missed this when you were talking but how does it go from in the Butler to the recycling facility? Oh, very good question. In Portland, we use, not an outfit, a work fair in exchange for your social services. You're required to do something in Maine. This is a perfect opportunity for it because they are, they do have the RFID tag on them. Doesn't require supervision. You don't need a $30 an hour supervisor to go watch somebody empty cigarette butts. The people just go out, they pick them up at the end of the day, they put them in a plastic bag, they call me because I love my wife, she's wonderful. But I have gotten close to a million cigarette butts in my garage right now. It's, I keep, it's separating from the house thing. It's, it's separating from the house thing. Wherever else I would, I would be also. But those are my props. So what happens with them? Once, once, once they're collected, plastic bag, put them in a box, you set up an account with tariff, so it's no charge. They will, in a button, you download a UPS call tag, mail tag, and then you put it on the brown trucks comes by and fix them up. So it works out pretty well. But. Teracycle pays you to deliver it? That's correct. Teracycle is, is, we're, we're kind of squishy with them, you know. Recently, the Paris, Paris Accords, whatever that was called, there, or the, the European Union is separating themselves from the polluters from the fixers, essentially. The tobacco companies love to greenwash by getting involved with these programs, all this other stuff. That's an issue that Teracycles, that's, that's their problem. We don't have that issue. We will send them to them, but that's about it. We don't take any money from Philip Morris or any of the other places, so. Unless they find it. What do they turn to me, do you mind? Oh, the, the, the plastics turn into pallets, railroad ties, non-medical grade, non, I mean, really cheap plastic, basically. And then the organics are composted out and then spread out. It's interesting. There's a, there's a fellow in, in Indiana who takes the filters, he's developed a process and mixes some chemicals with it, makes a book, essentially, from the L'Arcobetta work. That's being used to do the inside of pipes, industrial pipes, you know, I mean, you can run hydrochloric acid, hydrochloric acid to these things, it's impervious, it's really nasty stuff, it makes you wonder why you're in smoke up. I've been smoking for 25 years, so I've either side of the fence. China, with a vast number of cigarette butts in, I mean, they've got more than, in the world, they're actually doing mining of them. There's heavy metals in there, there's, I mean, there's 4,000 toxins in there. Toxins, iodine, chemicals, things like that, so there's, there's value. So this is to the point that James Rhodes made about holding industry accountable for the manufacturing of these plastics. Have those conversations started to hold industry accountable and have industry liaisons been invited to symposium like this to begin collaboration? So the short, well, the answer is yes, they have been invited to participate. I have been engaged in a number of mediated dialogues through organizations like Future 500 or Product Stewardship Institute, which is known for bringing together government actors, NGOs, as well as potentially regulated industry when it comes to product stewardship or producer responsibility. I would say the best progress we have made is with their packaging engineers, these companies that I've met with like Colgate, Palmoliver, Johnson & Johnson, a number of like engineers and packaging, like it's really brilliant. And they get exactly what we're talking about. The problem always breaks down in the marketing department. So, I mean, I've been able to work with companies to be like, yeah, we are absolutely willing to propose like this value type of, this type of packaging for our products. We think it makes sense from a life cycle analysis that includes post-consumer, like transit processing of the material. But if you can't slap a brand on it that makes it noticeable, the marketing department wins time and time again until government regulations come into place. And so for example, in California, they put together a voluntary program and asked manufacturers like they, California set a goal, we want 50% of all of our packaging. Packaging sold in the state to be diverted from landfills. And they told the industry to say, how are you going to do this? Just tell us how you're going to do it. You do it voluntarily, do whatever you want. They kind of came to the table after six months, nine months of planning and said, we'll never be able to do it. Which is to me, I'll put on my little political hat here, absurd because once again, just north of British Columbia is the government mandate went into place. Nine months later, those same industry players were had gone to over 70% within nine months as soon as it was mandatory. But voluntarily they said, we'll never meet 50%. I don't know all the time when I'm having something shoveled at me, but I think this is one of those situations. So. And I just want to add in since Sandra Whitehouse is down here and I don't think we have anybody else from Ocean Conservancy. I do know that Ocean Conservancy has been doing a lot of work with these same organizations as well. So, I do think that some of their recent research especially in their reports have looked to the manufacturers and have included them in the umbrella at looking at this problem. Absolutely, I do not mean to take away from that. The dialogues will continue in multiple different forums and we will see what comes out of this. But, so the short answer is yes. Long answer is also yes, that's great. Another part of that equation and I didn't get to talk about it because we ran out of time, but I've been working on a project now for a few years to develop a recycling solution for end-of-life fiberglass boats. It's a big problem. I don't have time to tell the story, but I will tell you that the major manufacturers I've spoken to have all said, how do we sign up? How do we get a green label on us as a boat manufacturer saying that we support the circular economy and recreational boating? So, there is, so far none of the manufacturers has run away from it. They've all said, we love the fact they're destroying old boats and people buy some more new boats. All right, with that, I think we are going to conclude. I'm going to ask this panel to stay seated here, but let's give them a round of applause. And in the effort to be brief, we have scheduled concluding remarks and what I just really want to say is thank you all for coming today. This is, to us, the start of a very important conversation. So, after this symposium, you will receive an email from us with information on some of the reports that you've seen, the ability to access PowerPoints. We did record, so you can go back and watch. You can have your students watch. You can have your colleagues watch. And we will also send you a survey and in that survey will be, what are the kinds of questions that you are looking forward to, learning more about and exploring more. And we are hoping at the Marine Affairs Institute to build off some of the great work that's already been done to see some really strong legal and policy solutions moving forward to this great problem of marine debris. So, thank you all for coming. We've kept almost to time. Won't keep you any longer on a Friday night, but thank you again.