By The Sea Lecture Series

Join us after hours for a lecture series featuring local scientists, conservationists, and photographers with brews!

Unwrap The Waves

Loggerhead Marinelife Center's Unwrap the Wave Initiative allows for students and community members to get into the "spirit" of conservation by collecting their candy wrappers from Halloween and recycling them.

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Pollution Prevention

Be Part of the Solution

Ocean Trash

With an estimation of over 8 million metric tons of plastic entering our ocean every year, the LMC conservation department provides targeted comprehensive preventive solutions to the marine debris items found throughout removal efforts.

LMC works tirelessly to remove marine debris through direct removal and pollution prevention initiatives such as beach and underwater cleanups and plastic reduction initiatives in partnership with local marinas, beach access points, and municipalities throughout Palm Beach County.

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Pounds Of Trash (YTD)

Jan to April = 1,929 lbs.
May to Aug = 1,385 lbs.

Why Do We Sort Debris?

Mangled bottle

Plastic pollution has increasingly become one of the most significant threats to our ocean’s health. Over 8 MILLION tons of plastic enters the ocean every year.

Plastic trash in the ocean does not biodegrade, meaning it will never completely go away. Instead, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time.

Debris Graph

How Can You Help?

  • Reduce your use of plastic bags, bottles, straws, and other single-use plastics
  • Educate others about the need to ditch single-use plastics
  • Avoid products with excess packaging
  • Get involved! Join your nearest beach or waterway cleanup

Marine Life Mistakes Trash for Food

Sea turtles and other marine life are eating our plastic trash, mistaking it for food. Once ingested, plastic trash can cause internal injuries and even death.

100% of hatchling sea turtles that enter Loggerhead Marinelife Center’s sea turtle hospital have plastic in their stomachs.

This plastic bottle, removed from the beach, shows hatchling sea turtle bite marks.

After each beach and underwater cleanup, Loggerhead Marinelife Center’s Conservation Department sorts and documents every piece of trash collected. Sorting this trash allows us to identify major types and sources of pollution. We use this information to develop targeted outreach and education programs that will reduce the amount of pollution entering the marine environment.

Programs

What goes up, must come down.

Since 2017 Loggerhead Marinlife Center has removed over 9,505 balloons from Florida Beaches to date.

Loggerhead Marinelife Center is partnering with cities and towns across Florida's coastlines to implement a ban on balloons.

Florida’s East Coast is home to the most densely utilized sea turtle nesting beaches in the country. At Loggerhead Marinelife Center, hospital staff regularly treat turtles with complications due to marine debris ingestion.

Balloons are often released, purposefully or by accident, and end up littering the ocean. Deflated balloons resemble jellies, a common prey item for sea turtle species. In an effort to promote the safety and protection of marine life, LMC launched a Balloon ban initiative to help mitigate marine debris. Bring the balloon ban to you!

For more information, please contact Valerie Nicole Tovar at [email protected].

 

Participating Municipalities

• Dania Beach • Fernandina Beach • Hallandale
• Hollywood • Juno Beach • Jupiter
• Lake Worth • Lantana • Miami Lakes
• 
North Palm Beach • South Palm Beach • Surfside
• Palm Beach County (Loggerhead Park)

In 2016, the most commonly found marine debris item in the world were cigarette butts. Cigarettes are made of thousands of microplastic threads that never disappear, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller microplastic pieces; posing as a threat to the marine environment. Knowing this information, LMC created the cigarette litter pollution prevention program and installed cigarette receptacles on the Juno Beach Pier, beach access points, partnering parks and RPI pier locations.

Since the inception of this program, we have diverted over 60,000 cigarettes from entering the marine environment.

This project was funded through the Keep America Beautiful Grant.

Most fishing line is made of monofilament, nylon. Because monofilament is often clean and thin, sea turtles and other marine life can easily become entangled in the line causing severe and or life-threatening injuries. To combat this, LMC collaborates with Florida Fish and Wildlife to manage the Monofilament Recovery and Recycling Program in Palm Beach County.

All of your used or unwanted fishing lines can be recycled in one of the 55 monofilament recycling bins located throughout Palm Beach County. These bins are emptied collaboratively by the LMC conservation team and Sea Turtle Adventures! Once the monofilament is collected, it is sent for recycling at Berkley Fishing Recycling in Iowa! Through this initiative, we have recycled over 1,200 miles of monofilament!

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Help Keep Our Beaches Clean

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