Kickstart: Behind the beach pollution numbers

What does it take to collect more than 143,000 pounds of trash from U.S. beaches? For environmental group Surfrider Foundation's 2022 beach cleanup report, it took 30,000 volunteers scouring beaches from the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines as well as the Great Lakes region.

PN's Jim Johnson has a story on the most prevalent pieces of trash collected (you shouldn't be surprised there was a lot of plastic), but the 27-page report includes some interesting angles from individual cleanups. Those regional stories, Surfrider said in its report, point to the people behind the numbers.

On Hawaii's Kauai Island, beach collections began in 2007 when students at a middle school and high school cleaned up fishing nets that had washed up on the island's east shore. The nets were such a continuing nuisance that volunteers continued to clean up nets from beaches every three weeks. Then, starting in 2013, volunteers began weekly cleanups.

Volunteers in California said they were disappointed only to find small pieces of plastic in their searches, accounting for about 1.95 pounds of pollution per person. But added together, Orange County workers removed 9,000 pounds of trash from beaches.

A resident living along Sebastian Inlet on Florida's Atlantic Coast contacted Surfrider after finding a polypropylene rope from a commercial fishing vessel. Two volunteers followed the rope to a tangled jumble of fishing nets that weighed in at about 600 pounds, requiring several more volunteers to clear.

There's been a growing push to add more single-use plastic containers to existing bottle bills. Typically, those containers are water or juice bottles. A retailer in the United Kingdom thinks it's time to add deposit programs to milk jugs.

The pilot program involves the online grocery store Ocado Retail and Polytag, a U.K.-based recycling technology company.

The digital deposit return scheme (DDRS) will use unique QR codes on each milk bottle. Rather than returning the bottles to a specific store location, consumers scan the code when they place their bottles in existing recycling systems, allowing the project to piggyback onto existing curbside recycling without extra costs.

Users receive rewards in their Ocado app, with 8 million of the bottles in the pilot qualifying for a 20-pence rebate, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

Expanded polystyrene has been used in helmets to protect bicyclists' heads since at least the 1980s. A French company has proposed using an inflatable polyurethane bladder instead.

Bumpair was developed in part by researchers at Sorbonne University, Sarah Houlton from our sister paper Urethanes Technology International writes.

So far, impact study tests show it performs well compared with foam. It can also be deflated so it's easier to store and pack in a small bag when not in use, although users would need to remember to bring the small hand pump with them in addition to the helmet.

I'm not sure if we'll see air-filled helmets in a future Tour de France, but perhaps sometime in the future, being an "airhead" will mean that you take safety seriously.