Fire hose, crib, and other oddities that wash ashore

SANDY HOOK, N.J. - Dirty underpants, a mannequin wearing socks, an air conditioner, and a working iPhone were among some of the stranger items picked up from New Jersey's beaches last year.

They were just a fraction of the nearly 302,000 pieces of trash collected by volunteers, a snapshot of a throwaway society that can be tracked through its trash.

Clean Ocean Action, an environmental group marking its 25th year of beach sweeps in New Jersey, has uncovered several trends simply by studying what people have tossed aside during the past quarter-century, not knowing - or caring - that it would one day foul the waterways and oceans. Beach sweeps this year will be held April 24 and Oct. 23.

"It's an incredibly wasteful society we live in," Cindy Zipf, the group's executive director, said Thursday on a trash-strewn beach at Sandy Hook's Gateway National Recreation Area. "I look at this and I have to wonder: What are we thinking? We used to not know better, but now there's no excuse. Twenty-five years later, we definitely know better."

Six-pack rings, once a bane of the coastal environment, have drastically declined as more manufacturers sell beer and other beverages in cardboard packaging.

But the amount of shiny Mylar balloons is skyrocketing. People either let them go on purpose, or they slip from the grasp accidentally, fly for miles, and end up in rivers or the ocean, endangering marine life.

The number of plastic shopping bags found on the sand has more than quadrupled, from 2,793 in 1993 to nearly 12,900 last year. Communities across the nation are debating taxing shopping bags to discourage their use, and several have done so.

Since 1985, Clean Ocean Action has documented every piece of garbage its volunteers pick up from New Jersey beaches, nearly four million in all.

Plastics have always accounted for the largest percentage of garbage, about 77 percent. Many plastic items can kill marine life by choking it or tangling intestines. Turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them, often with fatal results.

Some of the items that find their way onto the state's beaches are true head-scratchers. Last year, they included an acrylic fingernail, a baby crib, a fully decorated Christmas tree with lights, a coconut, a fire hose, golf clubs, a guitar, a 7-inch knife, pots and pans, vampire teeth, and a boomerang. (At least it won't come back this year.)

Items picked up in recent years included toilet seats, a pregnancy test (result unclear), bags of pet waste, an eight-track tape, half a Barbie doll, a tube of denture cement, a jockstrap, and fake breasts.

Crack vials seem to be down, mirroring accounts from law enforcement authorities that use of the cooked cocaine has declined from the 1980s.