Angela - Graphs

Even though I will be continuing my plastic research, I wanted to share the results in regards to the plastic I found on Florida's beaches. As you can see on the map to the right, I did find more pieces of plastic on the East coast; however, my classmate Seaira did ask if I knew whether the beaches had garbage receptacles and I must admit I did not consider finding a correlation between garbage bins and amount of garbage on the beach. In the future, I will make note of amount, size, and type of garbage bins plus distance to the high tide line.

 Ocean Plastic, in the graph below, pertains to pieces with biogenous materials or living organisms.

Please note: the white count may have a degree of error due to some white test fragments looking similar to plastic. Further, I only included colors that had a presence of a minimum of 10 pieces at one beach; colors missing from this graph include magenta, purple, gray, and black.

 With the exception of Marineland, which only had one piece of plastic, over 50% of the plastic found along the high tide line was composed of pieces less than 3cm, identified in the red hues in the graph below. The small fragments may be due to vehicles driving on the beach and crushing the pieces or the sun and waves deteriorating and breaking plastic debris.