Profiling the incredible California beach cleaner Sara Bayles led me to Danielle Richardet, who’s engaging in her own incredible beach cleaningness in North Carolina.
In 2010, Danielle read about the Oceana organization’s Ocean Heroes Nominees, and Sara was one of them. Danielle voted for Sara to win the honor. She followed Sara on her Daily Ocean blog, and when Danielle and her family went to Los Angeles for a family trip a couple months later, they joined Sara on a beach clean-up.
In Santa Monica, Danielle saw some cool, fin-topped cigarette litter receptacles called BaitTanks, created by Mark Armen, another friend of Sara’s. (More on him and them soon.) She posted pictures of the BaitTanks on her Facebook page. “I texted my friend that I want to help with the cigarette litter issue – ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to help,’” Danielle recalls.
A week later she was on the beach in Wrightsville NC, cleaning up cigarette butts. In 100 days, she, family members, and friends have picked up 35,104 cigarettes, in addition to other litter.
“An estimated 4.5 trillion cigarettes are littered every single year,” she notes. “How many years have cigarettes been around? The number of smokers is going down in our country but growing worldwide.”
It’s a common misconception that cigarette filters are made of cotton. Actually it’s cellulose acetate, a plastic derivative that, like any other plastic, degrades but never goes away. The filter contains byproducts from the cigarette smoke that went through it, including arsenic, lead, cadmium, formaldehyde, and 400 other chemicals. When littered, it all leaches into the environment.
Danielle already had a blog called ‘It Starts With Me,’ which she had been using to post eco-friendly tips. From August 2010 onward, the site evolved to record her daily beach counts and related musings.
Her story was so compelling, it won the Brita FilterForGood Film Project. As a result, a former winner at Sundance directed the terrific short film of her story: “Our Daily Ocean: A Story of Butts.”
The clean-ups have led to changes in the Richardet’s lives, big and small. “It’s one thing to hear about something, but another to actually see it happening,” she notes. “We had already started reducing our plastic waste – my husband and I wouldn’t accept straws when we went out. But our kids got them; it wasn’t something we were focused on, eliminating it from our kids’ routines. But once we were picking up so many – the last time I went out I picked up 60 straws in twenty minutes – that’s such a waste, and something that’s so easy for people to stop using. I don’t even think we were a month into the litter project when we all stopped using straws. The kids haven’t used straws in over a year. A company sent us glass straws, which are really cool.”
With prompting, Danielle mentions a bunch of other suggestions for reducing waste that otherwise ends up in landfills. She often saves water by sharing showers with any one of her three little kids. “I very rarely get showers to myself,” she says, laughing. They use bar shampoo rather than bottled; “they can’t waste it.” And she stopped using conditioner entirely. The family rarely buys anything contained in plastic anymore; she bakes cookies, tortillas, and banana bread instead of buying them. “We cancelled our trash service because we didn’t have that much,” she notes. “We have a 32-gallon trashcan that we fill halfway maybe once a month.”
Her cigarette clean-up work has led her to present her findings, all 30+thousand of them, at Wrightsville town hall meetings, pressing for a smoking ban on the beaches. “I never thought I’d be at a town hall meeting or anything,” she says. “I thought the people on the committee or Surfrider or somebody else would take my stuff and say ‘look what she did.’ I didn’t expect to be speaking at anything. It’s turned into something bigger than I ever thought it would be. That’s how an activist is born.” She then demurred. “That’s a strong word for me.”
I respectfully disagree. If that isn’t active, what is?
