- [Narrator] Cannon Beach is one of Oregon's most iconic
and popular beaches,
but Marc Ward and his crew
aren't here on vacation.
- Look at this.
There's so much under there.
- [Narrator] They're here to clean up.
- [Woman] You wanna go and run it again?
- You wanna run it with Mrs. Carrie?
This is what we love.
Just the most pure, pure sand.
This is pristine.
This is what you wanna sit in.
- [Narrator] Unfortunately, sand doesn't look this way
all by itself, at least not anymore.
- All beaches have microplastics now.
There was your coffee cup, what's left of it.
Now it's food for some marine organism.
- [Narrator] Micro plastics are the tiny particles
that make up larger plastic items.
They're also what's left
when those larger plastics breakdown.
To marine life these small suspended particles
look a lot like food.
In 2002, Marc founded Sea Turtles Forever
to protect the endangered animals.
- One of the most important aspects
of marine turtle conservation, is habitat.
So I started studying degradation of habitat.
And as we were working on that,
they were starting to lose
a lot of sea turtles in Australia,
and we were seeing microplastics
in every single necropsy.
Shortly after that,
we had 100 sea turtles stranded in Brazil.
And what they found in the necropsy
was thousands of microplastics
that they had ingested.
- [Narrator] One 13 pound turtle
had swallowed more than 3,500 pieces of plastic.
- Microplastic might be the most significant threat
to the longterm sustainability of marine turtles.
- [Narrator] Researchers knew that microplastics
were killing turtles,
but suspected there was more to the story.
- Plastics have the ability
to absorb persistent organic pollutants from the ocean
and the worst chemicals we ever made.
PCBs,
PBDE,
DDT,
were all contained in these microplastics now.
- [Narrator] These persistent organic pollutants,
known as POPs, have been linked to neurological defects
in children and cancer.
- [Marc] At that point,
I realized it's basically feeding toxic substance
to our entire marine food life every day.
- [Narrator] That also includes humans,
who eat that seafood.
- I realized that we had to develop some kind of system
to remove the microplastics.
- [Narrator] Marc came up
with a lightweight, low cost screen
to systematically filter microplastics
from the beach sand.
- We've set up a one square meter grid,
so that we can gauge the density
of microplastics in the beach.
- [Narrator] The teams have found everything
from hypodermic needles to the remains of shotgun shells,
to thousands of tiny pellets called nurdles.
- [Marc] For manufacturing of plastics.
- [Narrator] As discouraging as the results were,
Marc's screen was effective.
- It actually worked way better
than we ever imagined.
Not only can we do large areas of beach relatively fast,
but because it's a polymer mesh screen,
we found it generates a low static charge.
And we've discovered that we were collecting plastic dust
with that screen that you can't even see in the beach.
Particles the size of a grain of sand.
That was a big bonus.
Okay, now we gotta make sure
we get everything, every bit of this dust.
All this stuff, 'cause we're gonna analyze the sand too.
- [Narrator] The data collected
by the group's painstaking surveys,
are part of a variety of research and conservation projects
all targeting plastic pollution.
Recent innovations like
the System One Ocean Cleanup Project
to catch plastic before it gets to shore are underway,
but the press was quick to point out
that this effort didn't live up to its promise.
- The majority of plastics are subsurface.
There's no technology out there
that's gonna remove that plastic
without doing potentially great harm
to the marine food web,
because you're gonna be harvesting
a lot more than the plastics.
So when it comes to the beach,
we have an opportunity.
Oh, there's one of those nurdles I was talking about.
The industrial pellets,
they go into a plastic injection mold
and you get your sunglasses or your car parts.
That's the raw material that makes all plastics,
And there are billions upon billions of these
in the ocean now.
So many pellets in this load.
- [Woman] Marc, this is so bad.
- Yeah, this beach needs a full cleanup.
This year in Cannon Beach,
we've probably taken a ton just in Cannon Beach.
In one day at Fort Stevens,
we took 550 pounds.
You know, it's on that kind of a scale.
- [Narrator] Multiply that by all the beaches in the world,
and the problem can seem insurmountable.
That point is not lost on Marc Ward.
- You know, it's really bad.
It's bad everywhere.
It's not just here.
There's no end to this issue in our lifetimes
or our kid's lifetimes,
but I have to keep a positive attitude.
We have shipped hundreds of screens
all over the world,
so there's thousands of people filtering now.
And the other thing is,
you don't filter the whole beach.
The microplastics are all in a band
maybe five to 10 meters wide.
The bulk of the material
will be in that high tide wrack line.
We don't have to filter down there, thank God.
That would be impossible.
And we're removing several tons of microplastic
with our crew right here every year,
but that's not enough.
Our use of plastic is completely out of hand.
Plastic things wrapped in plastic, encased in plastic.
Any way you can get away from using plastic is a benefit.
This is not the ultimate solution,
filtering these beaches and doing our work,
but we're a vital part of the solution.
- I'll grab the shovels.
- And I look at the beautiful sand we just created
as I move forward one meter at a time.
You gotta focus on the good.