Air Date: Week of July 5, 1996

Facts about . . . beach clean-ups and the sorts of trash they come up with.

Transcript

CURWOOD: The Fourth of July holiday signals the start of serious summer. But if you're a serious beach-goer, you'll probably find more than sand, sun, and surf there. The Center for Marine Conservation has just released the results of last summer's national seashore cleanup. Volunteers collected two and a half million pounds of trash, and you can't blame industry for most of what they found. Sixty-four percent of the beach haul was cast off by consumers. The list includes 800,000 cigarette butts, 28,000 milk jugs, 6,000 light bulbs, 5,000 egg cartons, 80 chairs, 27 televisions, 20 mattresses, and 14 refrigerators. The Center for Marine Conservation volunteers also found nearly 160 creatures entangled in those plastic 6-pack rings. Only 14 of those animals survived. This year's beach cleanup takes place in September. And for this week, that's the Living on Earth Almanac.