A bowling ball. A baby’s car seat. An eight-foot slab of foam. A cross-country ski. Balloons, zip ties, needles, food wrappers, cigarette butts, and plastic bottles.
“You name it,” says Julie Silverman, CLF’s Lake Champlain Lakekeeper. From the bizarre to the mundane, Silverman’s fished it all out of the lake that she cares for.
Silverman has been passionate about protecting the water her whole life. She volunteered with the Rozalia Project doing marine debris cleanups even before joining CLF. Once she became Champlain’s Lakekeeper, she realized she was in a position to do more than just scoop up the trash after it reached her lake.
These days, cleanups sometimes conclude with Silverman, her colleagues at the Rozalia Project, and community volunteers dumping 500 pounds of garbage in front of Burlington, Vermont’s City Hall, and publicly sorting it to raise awareness. She’s tracked marine debris volume, composition, and hotspots, generating invaluable data. She’s led educational programs to inform communities about trash in Lake Champlain and how they can fight it. She’s also worked with other CLF advocates to craft state-level legislation targeting the trash that ends up in both freshwater and saltwater.
Today, she’s joining forces with other advocates to expand the fight.
Teaming Up to Fight Marine Debris
She jumped at the opportunity to establish a grant-funded coalition of six organizations, including CLF, the Rozalia Project, and Lake Champlain Sea Grant, to fight marine debris in Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain Sea Grant had hired a new director, Anne Jefferson, with an invaluable research focus on microplastics and marine debris. It was time to bring together the many people and groups who care about cleaning up the lake and finally tackle the issue in an organized, science-focused, concerted effort.
It’s been a busy first nine months for the Lake Champlain Basin Marine Debris Coalition. Silverman’s redoubling coalition efforts to identify trash hotspots around the lake for further research. As part of the coalition, she’s developing a Field Guide to Foam Marine Debris in the Lake Champlain Basin, since plastic foam is the number one trash item found in Lake Champlain.
She’s also working alongside Ashley Sullivan, executive director of the Rozalia Project and a long-time collaborator, to conduct more data-driven cleanups and organize more education and outreach. The Rozalia Project is a non-profit that protects New England’s waters.
“I’m passionate about this is because this is something we can fix. This is a problem we created, and we can solve it,” says Sullivan. “We know what the solutions are.”
The Cost of Garbage in Our Waterways
Like Silverman, Sullivan has dedicated her life to protecting our waters. She doesn’t like encountering debris when she walks Lake Champlain’s shores. “It’s disappointing … No one wants to see our trash in the natural world, right? It stinks,” she says.
There’s a real human and ecological cost to all this garbage, beyond spoiling our views and our enjoyment of the water. Toxic chemicals such as Bisphenol A, better known as BPA, and phthalates, are released from plastic trash. They can lead to reproductive issues, cancer, and disrupt hormone regulation.
To some critters, crumbled bits of plastic foam resemble tasty fish eggs. Others try to eat the edible plants that grow on the debris, masking the toxic trash underneath. Silverman recalls retrieving detritus with toothmarks.
If the poor animals succeed in swallowing foam, it can choke them, rip up their esophagus, and fill up their stomachs. Some starve to death because their gut is too full of microplastics to fit any food. Others are poisoned when the plastic leaches chemicals into their bodies.
The problem can trickle up the food chain. Microplastics eaten by zooplankton get consumed in turn by fish and birds. Humans who fish at Lake Champlain are at risk of getting an unexpected dose of plastic pollution with their bass dinner.
Changing Hearts, Minds, and Policies
Educating people about how they can contribute to reducing marine pollution will be a key part of the solution. Lake Champlain is nestled between the Green Mountains and Adirondack Mountains. Water rushing down their steep slopes collects a tide of litter and garbage that’s escaped containment and carries it into the lake. The lake accumulates this improperly disposed trash from an approximately 8,000 square mile watershed. Many people have no idea that their garbage can wind up fouling the faraway lake.
Of course, the issue goes beyond individuals tossing their plastic water bottle out their car windows. Flawed systems fuel the problem. Sullivan notes that many isolated, less wealthy communities don’t get frequent enough trash pickups. As a result, the trash can sit longer than it should, leading it to escape into the environment or driving residents to dump the trash rather than letting it stink up their garage or curb. This problem, along with the pervasive issue of dock foam which CLF is working to solve (see sidebar below) has been an important driver of marine debris drifting into Lake Champlain.
The Hidden Connection Between Climate Change and Litter
Climate change also plays a secret role in delivering garbage to Lake Champlain’s shores. Severe rainfall and flooding collect litter that might otherwise have been recovered and flush it into the nearest body of water, including the lake and its tributaries. Climate change fuels and worsens extreme storms like the ones that have battered Vermont.
Serious flooding in Vermont in 2011 was “supposed to be a 100-year flood,” points out Sullivan. Instead, more crippling storms have followed. After two major floods last year, “for the first time in my life, you could go out in a boat and see … bottles and trash floating on Lake Champlain. And that was something I had never seen before in my entire life. It was shocking,” says Sullivan.
Climate change is only going to accelerate the pace and severity of these disastrous storms. Every time one of them hits, more trash will be swept into our waterways. It’s not the most dangerous impact of climate change-driven extreme weather, but it’s another reason to fight it.
Cleaning Up Our Waters for Future Generations
There’s a lot you can do to fight marine debris, even if you don’t live in Lake Champlain’s sprawling watershed. Warn your friends and family about how their garbage can end up in a fish’s belly. Attend or even organize a cleanup for a waterway in your community. Make sure to log the data to help scientists better understand and combat the problem. Best of all, you can support the work of the coalition by petitioning your local lawmakers to pass policies that will prevent waste from turning into marine debris to begin with.
Silverman is proud to work alongside colleagues in other organizations to accelerate CLF’s fight against marine debris in Lake Champlain. The new coalition will take on this problem at its root. For too long, discarded trash has spoiled beachgoers’ views, hurt and killed animals, and leached poisonous chemicals into our waters. We need more education and stronger policies to keep toxic garbage and detritus out of our waterways.
“The Lake gives us so much,” said Silverman. “It deserves better than garbage from us in return. I believe this coalition can make Lake Champlain clean, healthy, and safe for future generations.”
The Problem of Dock Foam
A major source of marine debris that most people overlook? Dock foam, the big blocks of buoyant plastic “expanded polystyrene,” commonly known as Styrofoam, that keep docks afloat. They also have a nasty habit of crumbling around the edges or falling apart entirely, delivering a steady stream of plastic pollution into the waters they sit atop. Plastic foam additives such as color pigments, UV stabilizers, hardeners, and flame retardants leach out of the foam over time, polluting our lakes and rivers.
After a dock fell apart in 2019, Sullivan recalls that “foam was blowing up on the beaches like snow or hail.” Too small, numerous, and staticky to easily pick up, even she couldn’t retrieve much of the foam bits before they were scattered into the ecosystem, where they would remain for untold years.
Unfortunately, at the time, there wasn’t much the state could do either. “We had no recourse. We were calling the state asking them to investigate, asking them to do something, and they really didn’t have a lot of tools to do anything,” explains Sullivan.
That’s when CLF stepped up to make the policy change that the situation called for. Silverman collaborated with CLF attorneys to pass legislation that banned people from building new docks with “unencapsulated” foam. That means that new dock owners will either need to find an alternative or encase the foam with a durable material that won’t break down from wind, waves, and sun for at least 10 years. All new moorings and buoys must also use air-filled or protected foam floats. CLF drew on Sullivan’s data when crafting the policy. “Working with CLF, who can drive that policy change, was such a win-win for the lake,” said Sullivan.
There is also a ban on selling floating docks with unprotected plastic foam flotation. The law requires broken docks be repaired with durable encased solutions. “There are tried and true alternatives on the market that don’t depend on plastic foam to float a dock; air filled floats work. If and when an air-filled float breaks, it doesn’t spill plastic pollution into our water, it just releases air. The new air-filled float designs do a great job staying afloat even if broken. They’ve come a long way from your grandfather’s old blue barrel,” said Silverman.
Research shows that bans on single use items like plastic bags reduce the amount of trash on our beaches by as much as 47%. We know bans work. As the ban on unprotected dock foam is implemented over the next five years, Silverman expects to see less plastic foam pollution when she conducts her beach cleanups. We made this problem, and we can clean it up.