Surfrider Chapters and Student Clubs do incredible work year after year, keeping our beaches and coastlines beautiful and free of plastic pollution. Clean and healthy beaches are a universal benefit; people, wildlife, plants, and our coastal economies all prosper when our beaches are clean. The Surfrider Foundation tracks and shares detailed cleanup data to show the prevalence of plastic and trash on our beaches and uses this data to pass laws to ultimately reduce plastic pollution at the source, focusing on microplastic pollution on Florida beaches in this article.

Each year, Surfrider releases an annual Beach Cleanup Report looking at the health of our beaches from a national perspective. But we also think it is important to bring attention to the local stories and highlight the coastal activists doing inspiring work to keep our beaches beautiful. This month, we caught up with Evan Orellana, Surfrider’s Florida Regional Manager, to talk about their work on sampling microplastic pollution on Florida beaches, particularly Palm Beach, and what they learned from the project.

Q: Can you give us a quick overview of this project? 

EO: It is no secret that the world’s oceans and coasts have a plastic pollution problem. As plastic is exposed to the elements, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. These small pieces, called “microplastics” are an emerging issue within the plastic pollution crisis. Last year, Surfrider Foundation’s Palm Beach County chapter performed a microplastic survey at local beaches to help quantify the general abundance of microplastics.

Q: Microplastics, despite their size, sound like a pretty big issue. Can you elaborate a bit more on why they’re such a problem? 

EO: Absolutely! Microplastics are described as plastic particles or fibres less than 5mm in size. Due to their small size, recent studies have found that these particles are present in the air, ocean, food and even throughout the human body. More research on ingested microplastics is needed, but so far we know that plastics can cause negative health impacts in humans, including DNA damage, endocrine disruption, cancer, and diabetes. Even if humans could avoid direct ingestion, toxins found in microplastics can be absorbed by animals, working their way up the food chain and eventually reaching humans.

Read the full article about microplastic pollution on Florida beaches by Jennifer Harrah at Surfrider Foundation.