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Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program (BTNEP) Green Team collected over 5,400 pieces of marine debris on Elmers Island last week, including items such as doll parts and 12 dead sharks.
BTNEP has collaborated with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to clean the beach of Elmers Island once a week during the summer and once a month during the winter months. The Green Team goes to the island out there once a week with a team of eight people. As they pick up the debris, they voice record what they find and transcribe the items on a data sheet for record-keeping. They work with companies to find the origin of some of the debris as well, which has shown the island to contain items from as far as Haiti.
In last week’s cleanup, the team found 12 dead sharks all within 200 feet of each other — most with their tails cut off or eviscerated. “Sharks have a bad rep, and this was around the time of the Tarpon Rodeo, so they would kill them and throw them back,” said Community Outreach Coordinator Alma Robichaux. Although the teams don’t find this many sharks on a normal basis, Robichaux said the issue is still prevalent, and education is the number one thing that can help prevent it.
Robichaux said they find a wild variety of items on the beach, including shoes, flip flops, soles of shoes, salt bags and rubber gloves from shrimpers, hard hats that are suspected to come from offshore rigs, boat parts, syringes, mops, boots, waders, paint cans, kids toys, beach toys, and balloons. The organization works with companies to find the origins of some of the items. The doll parts found last week floated in from other countries and lollipop sticks were discovered to have floated in from Haiti. Robichaux said they are expecting to get more items from Haiti in the future due to the recent tropical storm. They also have found an airplane wing recently! The largest number of items found are plastic pieces. “Plastic never goes away,” she said, “ it just breaks down smaller and smaller. They find over 500 pieces of plastic per week.” Another disheartening thing they are finding is many items have fish or turtle bites on them, especially the styrofoam items. There are a lot of items left by people on the beach; however, she said most of the items come in from somewhere else.
Robichaux said education is key to be able to help the litter issue and beautifying our wetlands. BTNEP partners with organizations such as Keep Louisiana Beautiful and Keep Terrebonne Beautiful to help unify efforts. They have applied for grants for billboards and are hoping to keep the universities involved in order to get the younger population involved to hopefully lead to bad habits fading. They’re also working with different festivals to offer more sustainable festivals. They are partnering with French Quarter Fest and the Rougarou Festival to make the events sustainable so that all the trash is diverted from the landfills and is taken off the streets. The trash is usually recycled, composted, or properly disposed of. They have also written a grant for the Mardi Gras Associations in New Orleans to try to get them to throw more sustainable items than beads. They are encouraging crews to get more valuable throws that won’t be left on the ground. BTNEP has also partnered with the Louisiana Lieutenant Governor to work on visitor education to make Louisiana a cleaner state and possibly a “poster child” for other areas to help clean up the environment.
BTNEP also coordinates the Bayou Lafourche Cleanup. Although they had to revert to a virtual option last year due to COVID, Robichaux said they are hoping to be able to do next year’s event. They worked along with Nicholls State University marketing students to create a marketing campaign which she said will launch in October of this year for the March 2022 cleanup. They are also hoping to be able to be a part of the September 18 International Coastal Cleanup, where she said they will be on Elmers Island.
According to BTNEP, no other place is disappearing as quickly as the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary. They said the area is losing not only valuable resources but also a natural flood-protection system that absorbs storm surge before it can harm our communities. They strongly believe we can save our “terre bonne” or “good earth” and our ways of life if we work together and make smart choices.
The Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary contains some of the most diverse and fertile habitats in the world. The wedge-shaped area between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers contains levees, forests, swamps, marshes, islands, bays, bayous, and other habitats. Barataria-Terrebonne’s estuaries feed and shelter millions of migrating ducks and geese and support the commercial harvest of over 600 million pounds of fish and shellfish each year.
“You can’t go 10 feet in Louisiana without running into a ditch, a bayou, or some kind of waterway that goes straight into the Gulf of Mexico, so just have the awareness that everything you drop on the ground ends up in our waters. We are looking for trash-free water. That’s the initiative we are working towards every day. We’re hoping people will take responsibility for their trash and dispose of it correctly.”
