Citizen effort to clean beach kicks off investigation

At first, Janis Jones didn’t pay much attention to a few dime-sized plastic sprockets she picked up off the beach along the cliffs in Carlsbad.

“But over the course of the last two years, I kept finding them and finding them and thinking, ‘Well, this can’t be right,’” said Jones, a 55-year-old educator, who has made it her mission to clean the oceanfront several times a week after work.

In fact, trash has become a significant part of Jones’ identity. Not only does the Vista resident remove it from the sandy shores of North County, but she has started to document a seemingly never-ending stream of forgotten beach toys, balloons, beer bottles and candy wrappers.

“Everybody knows about the (Great Pacific) garbage patch, but I don’t think it’s real until somebody they know is showing it to them firsthand,” she said. “People don’t think about it affecting our beaches, but it does.”

Using her cellphone, she photographs her found items, often arranging them creatively, and posts them to Instagram and other social media. Over the last few years, she’s become part of an online movement dedicated to drawing attention to litter through online art.

After Jones began routinely finding the plastic sprockets on the beach, she reached out on social media to help identify the source of the pollution. Several people suggested the sprockets were called bio-filters — a type of plastic media used to control water pollution.

When churned in large vats of water, the plastic bio-filters attract a slimy layer of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and other organisms. That so-called biofilm is a key ingredient in processing various types of wastewater.

Jones called the Encina Water Treatment Plant in Carlsbad and talked to several different officials who assured her they weren’t using that specific type of filter.

“I believed them but still wanted to solve the mystery,” she said.

“I pick up a lot of trash off the beach, and most of it has a story behind it where I’ll never know the true story,” she added.

In June, an Instagram user commented on a picture of the sprockets that Jones had posted and suggested she contact San Diego Coastkeeper, a local nonprofit that takes tips from citizens about potential sources of water pollution.

Matt O’Malley, legal and policy director for the group, said that with the help of Jones, as well as state water quality regulators, he believes they’ve been able to track down the source of the pollution.

“San Diego Coastkeeper relies on the eyes and ears of the public to help us protect and restore our waters,” he said. “This is a great example of the public stretching our capacity to be throughout the county and watching over our inland and coastal waters.”

After a recent investigation, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a violation notice in August to a nearby hatchery run by Hubbs-SeaWorld, ordering the facility to stem the flow of plastic into the ocean of face a fine of up to $10,000 a day.

The Leon Raymond Hubbard Jr. Marine Fish Hatchery in Carlsbad is a 22,000-square-foot hatchery for seabass located on the Agua Hedonia Lagoon near the Poseidon desalination plant in Carlsbad and the NRG Cabrillo Power plant.

Hatchery officials are in talks with regulators but have not admitted to being the source of the water pollution.

While the facility does use the type of bio-filters Jones has routinely found along the beach in Carlsbad, hatchery officials said they have maintained adequate safeguards to prevent the unintentional release of the plastic media into the ocean.

“We’ve reassess our barriers to the media and feel very confident that it’s secure,” said Mark Drawbridge, senior research scientist at the Hubbs-Seaworld hatchery. “Anything’s possible, but we definitely have questions about what other sources it may have come from.”

Officials with the regional water board said the plastic washing up on the shores could be part of a years-old incident that continues to pollute local beaches and will continue to monitor the situation.

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