The Duck Creek Watershed Assembly held their semi-annual “blast the plastic” cleanup on the shoreline in Duck Lake State Park Saturday. The organization hosts this event every spring and fall, before and after the busy summer season on the West side of the state.
They began promoting this cleanup in an attempt to bring awareness to the damaging effects of plastic on the beach in Muskegon County, in partnership with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. As of 2016, approximately 22 million pounds of plastic enters the Great Lakes annually, according to the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The trash, primarily being plastics, includes plastic shopping bags, cups, straws and other unidentifiable items. Many of these can have other problems, including becoming a danger to other wildlife. An example would be animals getting tangled and potentially choking in the plastic rings that hold together a six-pack of pop or beer.
After seeing the effects of trash littering the shoreline and Great Lakes, the Duck Creek Watershed Assembly is dedicated to helping minimize or prevent these effects as much as possible. This fall, they collected over 33 pounds and 1,250 pieces of trash. The next cleanup will be sometime next spring. Information will be posted on the watershed assembly’s Facebook page.
