Michigan’s Grand Haven State Park is a little chilly for swimming and sand castles in early May, but the weather is perfect for a cleanup crew combing the shore of Lake Michigan.
Volunteers working with the Alliance for the Great Lakes pluck Styrofoam cups from the sand and catch grocery bags bouncing down the beach like tumbleweeds. Most of the trash they pick up is plastic.
“On average, 86% of the pieces that we find are composed either partially or fully of plastic,” said Olivia Reda, who organizes cleanups like this one from New York to Minnesota. “Unfortunately, a lot of things we completely recognize like straws, wrappers, water bottles, a lot of small plastic shards.”
Plastic pollution is a growing problem in the Great Lakes. A 2024 report by the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Science Advisory Board said microplastics are “ubiquitous” in Great Lakes water, sediment and wildlife. The Alliance for the Great Lakes said that for the last 10 years, it has collected more tiny plastic pieces than any other type of trash. Tiny pieces are easy to miss and can breakdown into microplastics that can never be removed from the lakes.
Beach cleanups
Reda weighs seven orange paint buckets and a couple of garbage bags volunteers have filled with 41.9 pounds of trash. Any litter on the shore can easily end up in the lake, she said. Unlike the ocean, where currents carry debris from far away, the Great Lakes are polluted largely by the communities and industries along their shores.
“That’s almost 42 pounds that’s not ending up in the Great Lakes,” Reda said to applause in Grand Haven State Park. “Wildlife can ingest plastic. We probably all have images in our mind of ocean plastic, like the turtle and the straw. That same thing can and is happening in our Great Lakes region, as well. One of the big differences is we drink the water from the Great Lakes, so that is a big public health concern.”
A little farther up the coast at Pere Marquette Park in Muskegon, there’s a more high-tech way of combing the beach.
Jamie Cross drives a battery-powered robot with a remote control, following behind its treads as it digs several inches into the beach. The BeBot sifts sand and rattles rocks around its hopper, looking for trash. Cross, a researcher at Grand Valley State University, said it’s good at scooping up tiny shards of plastic.
“It grabs those little things that normally get missed,” Cross said. “Plastic is everywhere in the environment, and it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Different toxins and things can attach to plastics, and then you’ve got fish eating that or other organisms and it moves up the food chain. We’re at the top of the food chain.”
Cross stops the BeBot and picks through the catch. There’s dried plant matter and rocks, but also bottle caps, a metal eye hook and colorful flecks of hard plastic. All this will be catalogued and studied by Cross and her colleagues at the Robert B. Annis Water Resources Institute. Then they will recycle what they can and throw out the rest, Cross said, but there is no way to keep it out of the environment forever.
“We really need to rethink the way that we use plastic,” she said, “because there’s not a good way of recycling it.”
The BeBot serves another role as a conversation starter. Anyone who sees a knee-high dune buggy trawling the beach is likely to stop and ask Cross what she’s doing and learn a little about plastic pollution in the process.
“That’s the biggest purpose; it’s an education and awareness tool,” said Annalise Steketee, sustainability manager at Meijer, the Michigan-based retailer that paid for this BeBot and others in the region. “The solution isn’t to roll out BeBots and solve the issue of plastic pollution in the Great Lakes, but if you’re sitting on the beach and see a beach cleaning robot pop by, you’re going to start asking questions and try to understand the issue.”
One couple strolling along the beach stopped by during our interview. They learned about the BeBot, and said it would be great if people stopped littering on the beach. But the most common question Cross says she gets about the BeBot is, “Have you ever found a diamond ring?” The answer? “Never! Not yet.”
Stopping plastic pollution at the source
There is no coordinated system to monitor microplastics across the Great Lakes. One study from the Rochester Institute of Technology estimated more than 10,000 tons of plastic enter the lakes every year.
Sherri Mason, who studies freshwater plastic pollution at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, said microplastics start off as macroplastics like bottles, straws and takeout containers.
“Then because of mechanical abrasion they will break into ever smaller pieces,” Mason says. “These smallest particles are actually the biggest concern when it comes to human health. They end up in our brains, in our livers, in our kidneys, in our lungs, and lead to a whole suite of human health impacts.”
It’s good to pick up litter, Mason said, but plastic pollution is like an “overflowing bathtub” — you have to stop it at the source.
“I support cleanup efforts, but if we’re not turning down the tap, if we’re not reducing our usage, the cleanup efforts are kind of pointless,” she says. “The solution has to really come from reducing our usage of this material, converting to things that are truly biodegradable and reducing our usage of fossil fuels.”
Back at the cleanup in Grand Haven State Park, Olivia Reda is the first to admit the problem is too big for volunteer beach sweeps to fix completely. Like the BeBot sparking conversations about plastic pollution, Reda said cleanups have another mission: they bring people together, and they collect data, not just litter.
“That’s data that we’re able to reference when we’re talking to decision makers and their staff. It’s exciting to be able to tell our volunteers and our staff and share with them, ‘You really are making an impact,’ even if it’s like, ‘Why am I tallying every single cigarette butt?’” she says. “It’s fun to see all of those actions adding up to some momentum.”
States around the Great Lakes have taken steps to reduce plastic waste. Illinois is moving to phase out some single-use plastic items. Last year, Minnesota passed an “extended producer responsibility” law aimed at reducing waste from packaging. Some lawmakers in Michigan want to repeal a 2016 law that prevents communities from banning or taxing plastic bags and bottles.
In the meantime, volunteers — and trash-collecting robots — will keep picking plastic off the beach.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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