NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Hurricanes and severe storms bring high winds, rain, strong waves, and storm surges that can damage or destroy your home, boat, or other property, can put your family or business at risk, and have the potential to create a large amount of marine debris. This document runs through some basic steps to prepare for storms and prevent your property from becoming marine debris.

Ella M. White Elementary fifth-grade students visited Thunder Bay River in the northeast Michigan watershed, where they used nets to trawl for plastics and were shocked to find microplastics in the water. After analyzing samples from the river, fifth-grader Tucker Bright said, “If there are this many microplastics in this little sample, just imagine how many there are in the Great Lakes!” To raise awareness about finding plastics in the river and finding solutions to this problem, these Alpena Public Schools students developed a film, “Plastics 101.”

Trash seems to be everywhere … blowing in the streets, perching in trees above creeks, and washing ashore on our nation’s coasts. Maybe that’s because people in the U.S. generated 262 million tons of solid waste in 2015 with about 13% of that being plastics — that’s equivalent to nearly 21 million school buses.

The guide is designed to be a resource for activities and information that can fit into existing lesson plans or can be followed verbatim as its own set of lesson plans. Whether you have one hour, one day or one week, the information and activities in this guide will allow you to develop a personalized marine debris education program.

Huge amounts of marine debris enter the ocean and Great Lakes every year, from large abandoned and derelict vessels and fishing gear, to plastic bottles, food wrappers, and other trash, and even tiny pieces of plastic that you can't see with the human eye! But once our trash is in the ocean, what happens to it? How long does it last, and can we ever say that it’s gone? Unfortunately, when we talk about degradation rates, or the amount of time something takes to break down in the marine environment, the answer isn't simple.

If you wish to be part of the solution to marine debris and are ready to do more than talk trash, watch our Trash Counts video featuring a citizen science project that is making a difference, one data entry at a time.

You may think that working in the deep sea means that we only see pristine environments, but unfortunately that isn't true. During our 5,000-meter dive in Sirena Canyon, along the Mariana Trench wall, we saw multiple pieces of marine debris.

Trash Shouldn't Splash was developed and initially implemented in Falmouth, MA. Here we provide a toolkit with information to help you implement a single-use plastics reduction campaign in your own community. The toolkit includes logos, materials, strategies, lessons from behavioral science, classroom visit plans and more. You may use as much or as little as you'd like. Thanks for making an effort to reduce waste in your community!

Ocean Today host Symone Johnson introduces the Trash Talk video collection, which explores marine debris.

Learn all about marine debris in this short documentary: what it is, where it comes from, the impacts, and what you can do.