Littered Highway of Sand : Texas’ Trashy Shoreline: Garbage Collector of Gulf

MUSTANG ISLAND, Tex. —  Tony Amos went looking for garbage at dawn.

And of course, he found it. He always does. This is, after all, the Texas coast.

He counted beer cans by the dozen, foam cups by the hundreds, egg cartons, light bulbs, gallon milk jugs, glass bottles, plastic sheeting, fishermen’s floats and numerous other items. He even found a cabinet door washed up on the beach.

Once, he retrieved a complete guide to military courts-martial, in two volumes, from the surf.

“I specialize in toilet bowl cleaners from around the world,” he said, and he has a collection to prove it.

Amos is no beachcomber. He is a scientist with the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in nearby Port Aransas. He drives a 7 1/2-mile stretch of the beach every other day, studying birds on the way out and items of trash on the way back, recording the numbers of each in a portable computer.

The reason for his interest is simple enough: Texas has the trashiest beaches in the United States, and Amos wants to know how the trash affects the coastal environment.

“How bad is it? Pretty bad,” he said.

Others share his concern. Bill Lukens, superintendent of the nearby Padre Island National Seashore, calls his 80-mile stretch of beach “the dirtiest national park in the nation.”

Max Hancock, the park’s chief ranger, put it this way: “You get everything that everybody ever threw in the Gulf.”

Last September, a volunteer cleanup campaign sponsored by the Center for Environmental Education within three hours collected 124 tons of debris from 122 miles of beach--more than a ton for each mile.

Beats Own Record

No other beach cleanup in the country came close to that volume until last weekend, when Texas beat its own record. This time around, volunteers stuffed 138 tons of debris into plastic garbage sacks.

Texas beaches are not despoiled by trash alone; they are often covered, from the dunes to the water’s edge, with tire tracks. The state has no law to prohibit cars, trucks and recreational vehicles of all kinds from tooling up and down on the sand.

In fact, Texas beaches are a part of the state’s highway system. They have pedestrian crossings and speed limit signs, and cars are allowed on all but a few miles of the coastline. On holidays, long lines of motor vehicles are bumper to bumper on the beach. And no politician who values his office is about to challenge a Texan’s right to drive on the sand.

Trash From Elsewhere

But if Texans are responsible for most of the tire tracks on their beaches, they are not responsible for most of the trash. As much as 80% of it comes not from weekend visitors who leave beer cans and paper plates in the sand, but from the Gulf itself, into which ships dump with impunity before they steam into port. Gulf currents are such that garbage dropped anywhere from the East Coast of Florida to Mexican and Central American waters is likely to find its way to Texas shores.

The Gulf is like a giant bathtub where every discarded thing drifts toward Texas. Start with the thousands of vessels that ply the Gulf, from tankers to shrimpers to pleasure boats. Factor in the thousands of offshore oil rigs. Add to them the incentive for foreign ships to jettison their garbage before making port because of strict U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, and the problem becomes enormous.

Environmentalists are concerned because of the danger that trash--especially discarded plastic--poses to marine life.

The tourist industry is also concerned. Tourism is the state’s second-largest revenue producer, and roughly a third of those who vacation in Texas visit the Gulf Coast.

Solution Is Complex

For the moment, Texas cannot do much about the dumping far offshore. Those campaigning to clean up the beaches and waters of the Gulf say there is a solution, but that it will take the ratification of international treaties, the policing of ships entering port and the imposition of stiff penalties for dumping.

Garry Mauro, the state land commissioner and a leader in the fight for clean beaches, said it could take three years just to get all those regulations in place, even if all went well. Meanwhile, not only the beaches, but also the coastal wetlands where thousands of migratory birds live in winter, will remain awash with garbage.

‘Not Protecting Anything’

“We’re not protecting anything until we stop the garbage dumping,” Mauro said. “We’ve got to stop it at the source.”

Texas beaches have been garbage-strewn for years. The problem was worse, in fact, when the offshore oil rigs were operating at full capacity, before the bottom fell out of the oil and gas market. Then, metal drums, some full of toxic materials, were washing ashore by the hundreds.

The movement to clean up the Texas beaches got its real start after Linda Maraniss, formerly of Washington, opened a regional office of the Center for Environmental Education in Austin in January, 1986, and went, as a first order of business, to visit the beach on South Padre Island.

Not How It Should Look

One vivid scene turned her into a cleanup campaigner. “I saw a woman breast-feeding on a blanket,” she said. “To clear a spot, she had pushed away Styrofoam egg cartons and plastic milk jugs and a lot of glass bottles. It made me depressed and angry. This isn’t the way beaches should look.”

Maraniss persuaded Mauro to lend his face to that first September beach cleanup. The land commissioner was running for reelection and jumped at the chance for the television exposure. Until then, he had known little about the sorry state of the Texas beaches, but the volume of trash collected in three hours and the knowledge of where it came from converted him.

“It was Linda’s impetus,” he said. “She put the facts together, and the facts are so obvious that no one could disagree with them.”

The facts, essentially, were these: Because it fears fruit flies and other disease-bearing insects, the U.S. Department of Agriculture does not allow ships from foreign ports to dispose of garbage in the United States unless it is steam-sterilized or burned.

There are only two such waste disposal facilities in the country, one in Baltimore and a smaller one in Galveston, Tex.

Navy Dumping

So the merchant ships dump their waste in the Gulf. Incidentally, so does the U.S. Navy, which puts its waste overboard as a matter of course. One estimate by the Center for Environmental Education is that the Navy dumps 60 tons of garbage each day in the world’s oceans.

As a result of all the dumping in the Gulf, most of the trash on Texas beaches comes from beyond the state’s jurisdiction.

Environmentalists say that the plastics, which take 450 years to disintegrate, are a particular hazard to marine life. They say that pelicans die of strangulation when they become entangled in plastic fishing lines, that turtles die from swallowing plastic debris and that birds drown when they become trapped in commercial nets they cannot see while diving for fish.

In one widely reported case, Lafitte, an infant pygmy sperm whale, washed up at Galveston in 1984 and was transferred to an aquarium, where it died 11 days later. A plastic bread wrapper, a corn chips bag and a 30-gallon plastic garbage bag were found in the animal’s stomach, and death was attributed to severe infection of the abdominal cavity.

There is a partial solution to the garbage problem. An international treaty on maritime pollution, known as MARPOL, was drafted in 1973. It has provisions covering five categories of pollutants, would ban garbage dumping within 25 miles of shore and all dumping of plastic, and would require ports to have waste disposal facilities.

It has taken years to bring any of the five provisions, called annexes, into effect, because at least 15 countries accounting for 50% of the world’s shipping tonnage must approve each one.

The annex banning oil pollution was effective in 1983. Another concerning waste chemicals was ratified just last month. The ban on garbage-dumping has been approved by President Reagan and is awaiting Senate ratification, but even with U.S. approval that annex will be short of the 50% of world tonnage figure needed to ratify it.

Persuade Other Countries

Rear Adm. J. William Kime of the Coast Guard, the U.S. representative to the international Marine Environmental Protection Agency, said he hopes that American ratification will persuade other countries to do likewise.

‘Almost Enough’

“I am very optimistic about this going through,” he said. “Once ratified, that will be almost enough tonnage to bring it into force.”

Mauro believes that still more regulation is needed, however. He wants to stop all dumping in the Gulf. Under the international treaty, that would require that the Gulf be designated a “special area,” as are the Mediterranean, Baltic, Black and Red seas and the Persian Gulf.

If that happened--and there is no guarantee that it will--only food waste could legally be dumped overboard, and that at least 12 miles out. Mauro also wants to set up a ship inspection system at Texas ports, and to fine or deny docking rights to ships that do not come in with all their trash aboard.

He has called on Maraniss and the Center for Environmental Education to prepare the technical data that would have to be presented to the international committee. Kime said that other Gulf countries would have to approve the measure.

Mauro thinks it is going to work.

“I don’t get involved in many issues where there is a clear-cut solution,” he said, “but there is in this one.”