Commentary: An “Epic” day for Vashon beaches

Editor’s note: Green Briefs is a series commentaries by eco-leaders on Vashon, presented in The Beachcomber in partnership with The Whole Vashon Project.

Islanders tired of intertidal tires and other beach trash liberated 126 tires for recycling, 542 pounds of beach trash destined for the landfill, and 50 gallons of commingled recycling materials at the Rotary Epic Day of Service on Saturday, May 17.

As noted in a Beachcomber Green Brief in March, these tires aren’t just eyesores contaminating our landscapes. They degrade into microplastics and emit toxins that poison ecosystems and kill salmon and other aquatic species. Those toxins tend to work their way up the food chain into humans, so it is important to remove them from the environment.

Sadly, many of these half buried intertidal tires have become homes to a variety of invertebrates and aquatic species, including crabs, barnacles, clams, mussels, anemone and centipedes. Little do these innocent species know they are being poisoned by their deteriorating tire abodes. One wonders how many tires remain on Vashon’s 52 miles of shoreline — this “Epic” effort involved surveying approximately 26 miles of shoreline, so half of Vashon beaches remain to be studied.

Thanks are due to the more than 50 islander and visitor volunteers who pitched in to comb island beaches, removing plastic and other unnatural flotsam and jetsam — including the McLean Road neighborhood team which excavated more than a dozen tires at low tide on Saturday. Thanks also to George Spano, Erin Kieper and Keller Cyra for providing their boats for three expeditions lasting more than 15 hours altogether over the last month to recover and transport all the tires from remote beaches to Jensen Point Park, where they were staged.

King County Solid Waste kindly commissioned the nonprofit Friends of the Trails from North Bend to remove the tires and recycle them. Five able bodies filled two Friends of the Trails trucks with tires on Sunday May 18. A dozen of the largest truck tires did not fit on the trucks and will require another trip, scheduled for May 21.

Vashon Rotary coordinated two staging areas at Jensen Point and Dockton Park; thank you to Vashon Parks and King County Parks for their hospitality in hosting us, and Zero Waste Vashon for loaning their canopy. Portland artist Addie Boswell participated in the event, culling through the collected beach trash to extract many gems of raw materials for her beach trash art to raise awareness of the negative impact of plastics and litter on the natural environment and humanity.

Island volunteers used Vashon Nature Center grabbers, and recycled feed bags provided by island recycling expert, Erinn McIntyre, to efficiently remove beach trash from North Quartermaster Harbor at Portage, Southeast Maury Island beach and others that were particularly enriched in trash.

We are working with King County and other island organizations to establish an effective system for mapping, removing and recycling beach tires. If you have any brilliant ideas on how best to continue these efforts (we have yet to try low altitude drone-based video surveys at low tide), please let me know.

Thanks for keeping Vashon beaches clean, healthy and beautiful!

Steve Bergman is a geologist, Zero Waste Vashon board member and Whole Vashon Project advisor.