Narrator (1984 doc)
This is Dee River, just south of Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast. The first storm of the season just rolled in the night before, and volunteers up and down the coast are facing gale winds and high seas as they begin their search for the plastic debris.
Anja Krieger
Welcome to Plastisphere, the podcast on plastics, people and the planet. My name is Anja Kriger. In this episode, we’re going to head out to the beach for International Coastal Cleanup Day. It’s a huge event, which has been taking place each third Saturday of September for four decades now. Each year that day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm to the shorelines and collect and remove the trash they find. But beyond just cleaning up, International Coastal Cleanup Day is an important part of the science and politics of plastics. But how did it all begin? In the next two episodes, you’ll get to hear the little-known stories of the women who started the beach cleanups in the 1980s. These early activists did not only mobilize citizens to put a global spotlight on plastic pollution, they were also the first to count and classify the trash, which produced invaluable data to better understand the growing environmental issue plastics posed. And right from the beginning, beach cleanups drew the interest of the plastics and packaging industries. They got entangled in the blame game between society and industry. We’ll explore this history in more detail with Elsa Devienne. Elsa is an assistant professor in US history at Northumbria University in the UK, and she’s the one who dug up this story. Hi Elsa, thanks for joining us.
Elsa Devienne
Hi, Anja. Thanks for having me.
Anja
Elsa. I remember from our very first conversation that you had found four American women who had initiated the cleanups in the United States. And that story starts with a person you thought wasn’t around anymore. You told me:
Elsa (archive recording, 2024)
Out of those four women, one I believe is dead. I haven’t been able to find her. Her papers have been deposited at the Historical society in Oregon.
Anja
And when we chatted, you realized that there was one thing you hadn’t attempted yet.
Elsa
Yes, I did. And I’m so thankful you pushed me on this, Anja, because she’s so important to the story. So this is Judie Nielson, and I kept on seeing her name, you know, when I was doing the research, sometimes under the name Judie Nielson and sometimes as Judie Hansen. So Judie was working at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in the early 80s, and she was the first to organize a citizen science beach cleanup in 1984. I really wanted to speak with her, but I kept on hitting walls after walls. No one knew where she was. So, as I said, her papers had been deposited at the Oregon Historical Society, which is usually what happens when people retire, or maybe if they die, then their family deposits their papers. She wasn’t anywhere on social media or on the internet, and the only trace I could find at the time was this web page from the Oregon Environmental Council, where she had volunteered. Maybe, you know, three decades ago; it was already a very old web page at the time. And so when we spoke, you asked me, well, have you looked everywhere? And I thought, well, I haven’t actually emailed that organization. Even though that webpage is really old, who knows, maybe someone will know about Judie there and, well, they knew. They actually had a contact for her and they gave me her email address.
Anja
I remember how thrilled I was when you wrote me that, that you were actually able to find her. And what’s even better, you then contacted her to interview her and you recorded your conversation for us. So let’s take a listen and hear the moment you both connected.
Judie
I thought it was very funny that you wanted to know if I was still alive. I had such a good laugh on that. Are you still there? Are you dead? No. What happened to her? I’m still here.
Elsa
I loved your message. Starting with MIRACLES OF MIRACLES. I AM ALIVE.
Judie
Right.
Anja
Indeed. She does sound very much alive and like someone with a really great sense of humor.
Elsa
Yeah, Judie’s absolutely amazing. And she has a wicked sense of humor. And you have to understand that at this point, I had been researching this story and this woman for over a year. So I was just, when she emailed me back it was as if, like a ghost came out, you know, arrived in the room. So it was just incredible. And our first email, just for context, was in all caps because she has issues with her eyes and she can’t see small characters. So, you know, imagine receiving that email. MIRACLES OF MIRACLES. All caps. I AM ALIVE. And so she’s 88 now. She lives at a senior living facility in Portland, Oregon. But she’s, you know, so on it and so passionate still about beach cleanups. She has the poster of that first cleanup in her room. She did a big presentation on the 40th anniversary in 2024 to all the people in her living facility. And she was really keen to speak with me about it. She really wants the story to be told.
Elsa
Can you tell me what you can remember from that day? I think it was the 13th of October?
Judie
Yes. And it was a very blustery day. And the fact that 2600 people showed up at the coast was a shock because, I mean, we had no idea how many people would show up. And I went to Lincoln City and I ended… I’d always pictured myself, oh, I’m going to be out here on the beach. The helicopter is going to be overhead. I’m going to be out here with all these wonderful people. And so I went to a little inlet. I got in my car and went down to this place where I could access the beach. And I was the only person there, and I did the whole cleanup by myself which was, you know, kind of sad because I had pictured myself being out with all these people, but where I was, I could look across the bay and see the helicopter and all that was going on over there. And after I cleaned up my little portion of the beach, I went and had lunch with everybody. And it was, it was all great, but it was kind of sad because I had pictured myself being out there with everybody and I was by myself, but I got a couple of little, um, little people in, the sand, you know, a little guy. He was like a deep sea diver, you know, with all the equipment and stuff. And he was only about two inches tall, but.
Elsa
Like a toy.
Judie
Yeah, like.
Elsa
You still have them?
Judie
Yeah I do.
Elsa
Oh, that’s great.
Anja
That’s such a sweet story. And it makes me think of this project called Lego Lost at Sea. I don’t know if you know them. They collect all these toys that they find at the shoreline, and then they publish these beautifully composed images of them on social media. Now, Judie is like the godmother of the beach cleanup, right? She started this before it ever became a thing.
Elsa
Yeah, well, let me clarify here. There’s been cleanups since at least the 60s and 70s. It’s been a thing since that period, at least. But at the time, in the 70s, when it started becoming a more frequent event you’d see on the shorelines, it was just to clean up just to, you know, like literally to make the beach clean again. But Judie was the first who had the idea to do this in a systematic way and to send volunteers with data cards where they would not only count, but record what they found on the beach. So what she did is what we’d call today citizen science. And she got really interesting results back then. I mean, think about it. Nobody knew what was out there in the ocean, on the shorelines. And one of the first important figures she came out with from that event is the number 60% of the trash being Styrofoam. And of course that’s a shocking number at the time. And the big question was: where is all that plastic coming from? Now, Judie was also the first one who did a real communication campaign out of that cleanup. She had loads of contacts from volunteering in environmental organizations, and she was a great communicator and event manager. She e loves talking about how she had this little red notebook where she had kept all the names of all the important people in the state, in the media, in the industry. And so she used, she put those skills to work to really bring the issue of plastic on the beaches and in the ocean to the attention of the public.
Anja
Yeah. I mean, it’s quite impressive to think that she got over 2,000 people to go to the very first beach cleanup. I think that’s a real testament to how much effort she must have put into this. On top of that, she did all of that in her free time. So what did she tell you about how she got into this very peculiar hobby?
Elsa
Oh, that’s a great story. And it all started just one normal day when she was sitting at her desk at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. She was working there and one day, this, you know, delivery comes from the mail. This magazine lands on her desk. It’s from the Alaska Fish and Game magazine. This is the summer of 1984. And you know what? She just starts flipping through the pages, and right away, her attention gets caught by this article titled “The Plague of Plastics”. And in the article, there’s this story that really, really shocked her and stuck with her. It was the story of this brown bear that had been found in a really, really bad shape by this biologist in Alaska, and the autopsy revealed that in its intestines were polystyrene cups, maybe 13, I can’t remember the number, but an incredible number of plastic cups. And that really shocked her. And this is just thinking of that brown bear over the next few days and weeks that got her to have this idea of the beach cleanup, to bring the issue of plastics to the public. It really completely changed her life and her perspective on that issue.
Judie
Well, I knew that birds got entangled in fishing line and six-pack rings. You know, at the time, six-pack rings were, you know, the big no no. And that really called attention to it. But I didn’t know about how they were ingesting it. You know, when I read about the Alaska brown bear, when it was necropsied, it was determined that it had 13 styrofoam cups in its stomach, and then it starved to death. And so then I figured, well, I’m a bird watcher. And I knew about, you know, six-pack rings and fishing line, but I didn’t know about all this other stuff. So I decided, what could we do to call attention to it? And at the time, my boss was sort in trouble with the coast because our agency had made some fish and wildlife decisions that people didn’t like. And so I thought, well, how about cleaning up the whole Oregon coast? And that’ll make us the good guys again. And it worked.
Anja
Successful greenwashing, so to say.
Elsa
Well, yeah, one can say that. But what’s really cool is that today we have a video of that day at the cleanup, that morning in October 1984. Judie thought, you know, you can’t just have one day and that’s it. We need more. We need data, of course, but we also need to have people filming it. And so she organized for funding to be spent on a team of videographers to come on the day of the cleanup. And what’s great is that that film was then uploaded by Judie’s grandson only recently on YouTube. So you can actually go and watch it on YouTube. It’s called “Get the Drift and Bag It”, and it has so far a whopping 40 views. But it’s just fantastic to see not only those families, those citizens walking along the beach, discovering the problem of plastics in the ocean, which we think is a recent problem but really isn’t, collecting trash, but of course, you also get to see a young Judie.
Narrator (1984 doc)
On October 13th, 1984, Oregonians decided to tackle the problem. More than 2000 volunteers, supported by hundreds of businesses and industries, gathered at sites along the coast to take the first step toward a practical solution. They set out to get the drift.
Elsa
So in the rest of the video, we hear from a local fisherman. We also have a representative of the plastic industry who’s interviewed, and we of course, get to hear Judie.
Narrator (1984 doc)
Judie Nielson, executive assistant to the director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, organized and coordinated the campaign that drew statewide response.
Judie (1984 doc)
The purpose is to call attention to the proliferation of plastic debris in the natural environment, and to let people know that there are consequences as far as wildlife is concerned, either through ingesting the plastic particles or from entanglement with styrofoam cups.
Anja
And of course, I’m one of the 40 viewers of the video. After Judie speaks, there’s also a kid in the video who talks about styrofoam cups and how birds can eat them and how they can cloak their stomach. You mentioned that Judie and her volunteers did actually find a lot of styrofoam, and that that was a bit of a mystery. So did they find out where that came from? Was it those coffee cups?
Elsa
So here it’s worth taking just a moment to clarify something about Styrofoam, because in the US, Styrofoam is kind of a catch all term to talk about all kinds of white foam plastics. And it’s not really an accurate use of the term, because Styrofoam is actually the trade marke name for extruded polystyrene foam, which is a very specific kind of foam that’s used in construction and insulation. It’s very sturdy and sturdier, really, than what we think of as Styrofoam, which is actually called expanded polystyrene foam, and which is the kind of foam used for coffee cups and takeaway. Styrofoam at the time, and still today, is the word we use for both kinds of white foams. So I asked her, you know, what did they find exactly? What was this plastic foam from? And her answer really surprised me. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t from the throwaway cups that many of us might have taken home from a cafe. It was something else.
Judie
Another little project that I was really determined to to get rid of is polystyrene boat docks because, you know, they sit out there and they just start degrading and degrading and degrading and people, you know, big hunks of it fall off and stuff and end up in the environment. And I was, you know, happy to call attention to that and at the Columbia River and, well, all the major rivers that go into the ocean, that was where we found the most Styrofoam, and most of it was from docks where it would just, you know, fall off in big hunks.
Elsa
You mean from shipping containers?
Judie
Uh, no. No, just from people. I don’t know that they even do that anymore. Whether docks are still made of styrofoam. I mean, the docks would be styrofoam.
Elsa
Oh, wow. Yeah. I don’t know if they do that.
Judie
You know, floating. It was lightweight and people could deal with it, but I don’t know whether that’s still the case or not.
Elsa
So a lot of styrofoam you found was from those docks?
Judie
Yes.
Elsa
Hmm. Interesting.
Anja
So that is yet another application of plastics I had no clue about until now. She and her volunteers gathered all this knowledge. What happened then with it? Did that change anything? Did the beach cleanups contribute to any change in that industry in any way?
Elsa
It definitely did. I mean, not right away, but by talking about all these problems, Judie and other cleanup organizers, leaders definitely made a change. And they made a change in two industries in particular, the boating industry and the fishing industry. What’s important to understand here is that when Judie and the volunteers went out there, what they found was largely fishing debris, fishing trash, essentially fishing nets and ropes and boating trash. Now, it’s hard to believe because these days it’s all about single-use plastics. But consumer plastics really doesn’t come into the picture at all in the reports from those cleanups in the 80s. It’s really not until the late 80s, early 90s that it’s a thing. What’s really important at the time is ocean dumping. That’s the big concern. And there’s an international treaty at the time banning the dumping of plastic at sea. But it’s not been enforced yet. And people dumped all kinds of stuff from boats, but also from oil platforms without giving much thought. Now clean ups, I should say it’s a spoiler alert again, played a big role in making that ban enforceable. You might have heard of it. It’s called the MARPOL treaty Annex V. Now, this is important because in years after, like I said, from the 90s onwards, the beach cleanups are going to be framed very differently. They’re going to emphasize forms of plastic pollution that are linked to individual behaviors, to littering, basically kind of blaming careless consumers for the problem.
Anja
Yes. And that is exactly the narrative we hear again and again, especially from the plastics industry. Now, this first beach cleanup happens in 1984. And as I’ve learned, that’s also the year the first international conference on marine debris took place in Honolulu in Hawaii. So, the community of scientists and activists, they were becoming aware of this problem.
Elsa
Yeah. And actually, Judie got an invitation to attend. So at this conference, Judie shows up, she has this little project, and she felt so out of place there at first.
Judie
I was so nervous because I had this little volunteer project, you know, with a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, filling out questionnaires and stuff. And I was to give that presentation at the Fate and Impact of Marine Debris Conference. Well, I was so nervous because the guy who was running it was from Japan, and he kept saying, well, we don’t want any little volunteer things. We, you know, we don’t want this, we don’t want that. And so I got up and gave my presentation and I got a standing ovation because all of the people at the conference had never been able to get any funding to find out what you would find if you did a whole coastline, you know, they would go out with little not measuring cups. But, you know, they’d do one little square of a beach and see what they’d find. And they really, you know, were tickled pink to find out that I’d done this whole thing. And then I got hired to do the New England states and Washington, Oregon and California. So, I mean, it just grew and grew by leaps and bounds, and it had nothing to do with my job at Fish and Wildlife. It was just an idea I had. And my boss was, you know, went for it. So that was great.
Elsa
And so I, I saw that there were cleanups before, you know, people cleaning the beaches, but yours was the first time people, like you said, systematically counted. So.
Judie
Yes.
Elsa
Can you tell me how you got that idea?
Judie
Well. And it was just a five by seven card that people could mail back in or could give to the zone captains when they finished their cleanup. I don’t know, I just decided it would be a good idea to write down what we found rather than just going out there and filling bags.
Elsa
Definitely it made all the difference because all of a sudden the the plastics, people started paying attention.
Judie
Yes they did. There was one guy I can’t even think of his name now, and I stayed in touch with him until I went to Indiana, because he really was in favor of what I was doing. But he represented the plastic industry, and it was like they started circling the wagons. And that’s when we changed it from “the plague of plastic” to “get the drift and bag it” because, you know, but they were very helpful and, and I got to go to different plastic industries to find out how they made egg cartons and things like that. But the most difficult thing of the whole thing was deciding how to divide 306 dozen hot dogs on the 13 zones, because down in Gold Beach we had like only 12 or 15 people because it’s, you know, not highly populated. And then in Lincoln City, we had 250 people and we got everybody fed. But the hot dogs all came out just right. But I don’t think they feed the the volunteers anymore as far as I know.
Elsa
No, I don’t think so. But do you do you feel like you were pressured to change the name of the cleanup?
Judie
Not really. I just realized that I was going to get more cooperation from the plastic industry by changing the name.
Anja
I love how she goes back and forth between the logistics of it, the hot dogs, and then, you know, this question about working with the industry. It’s really interesting how somebody remembers an event like that.
Elsa
So the original name of the cleanup was “The Plague of Plastic” Cleanup. And then she changed it to, you know, the “Get the drift and bag it” slogan. So changing the name was important. It was about cooperating with the industry, not only because, you know, the industry was going to give that financial support, which Judie needed. It was, like she says, this little volunteering project, but also because she wanted to increase the impact. You know, you got to work with those people whose plastic is out there, especially at the time, at the beginning, when plastic leaks from plastic plants were a common issue. But in general, again, the context here is that the plastic industry is already feeling a lot of pressure to clean up its act, so to speak. We’re in the late 70s, early 80s, when there are already bans imposed on six pack plastic rings, we have bottle bills that are being passed in several US states to establish deposit systems, the first is in Vermont and it’s starting to spread. So the plastic industry is really feeling the pressure and needs to organize to respond to these challenges. So the Society of Plastics Industry, which is the organization that represents plastic producers in the US, started promoting recycling as a solution around that time, really even earlier than that time. But in the 80s, recycling really, really becomes that solution for SPI. So the Society of Plastic Industry (SPI) funded the cleanup, but it also started saying in the media: “we’re going to commit millions to open this big center of research to to develop better recycling methods for plastics”. And these pledges made it look like, you know, they were on it, they were doing something. And of course, for organizers of cleanup like Judie, the dilemma becomes, you know, do you accept the money or not? But again, let’s remember that Judie is doing this on her own time. It’s a little pet project. She doesn’t have any money. And, you know, it’s kind of understandable that at the time, you’d start with those who caused the problem. But again, this is a question that’s going to come up again and again in future cleanups.
Anja
I think it’s super interesting because we’ve got these volunteers who are donating their time, figuring out the logistics with basically no budget. As you say, they need supplies. They need bags to collect the trash. They need money to organize everything. And then, as you just say, the plastics industry is like a natural partner because they don’t want to look like careless polluters. So they have an interest in maybe having their name on the bags. And Judie knew that and she accommodated that. Now, how long was Judie active as an organizer of these beach cleanups?
Elsa
She actually only did it for four years. And so she did the first in 1984. Then the second year she expanded the project beyond Oregon. She took the project to New England and to Washington and California. And she also was really keen on expanding the project and making sure that her experience would be helpful for other organizers out there. So she writes a guidebook for people who want to organize their own cleanups. But in 1989, she moves to Indiana because she meets her second husband. And, well, there’s no coastline in Indiana. So when she goes there, she starts talking about plastic, but nobody cares. And she had to move on. But she really did miss her activism and the cleanups. She told me all about it.
Elsa
Did you do you look back on things and think, wow, it’s crazy how much I did? Or like, when you look back, what do you think?
Judie
I think I was nuts. (laughter) No. I got so caught up in it. I mean, it was all of my existence for, you know, the last four years that I was in Oregon before and and then, you know, when I had to leave to, to marry Ed, that was quite an adjustment because we were 500ft off the road in a very rural area with no close neighbors or anything. And you can imagine how that was for me, being the center of attention for so many years and then going there and being basically nobody. But what I did was I led bird walks in the parks on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and had quite a little following of people that wanted to come and learn about birds.
Anja
I must say she sounds so lovely and passionate and also proud of what she did. It pains me a little bit to learn that the inventor of the beach cleanup had to start over from scratch, basically just because she moved away from the ocean.
Elsa
Yeah, it’s kind of sad. And like she said, she used to be like, you know, this, she used to have all this attention around her. She won so many prizes. I mean, that’s something we didn’t talk about. But yeah, she won so many prizes. She really got a lot of attention at the time. And then she moved to Indiana and..
Anja
Right. But that reminds me. Didn’t you tell me she got a prize from what’s his name, from the guy in the commercial. People start pollution. People stop pollution.
Elsa
Yeah. Iron Eyes Cody, the, you know, supposedly Indian man who has this single tear rolling down his cheek as he looks at people by the freeway throwing trash from their cars. It’s this famous Keep America Beautiful ad that framed pollution as a people problem rather than as an industrial, you know, a plastic industry problem, a packaging industry problem. So she actually met Iron Eyes Cody, and she’s super proud of it. She has this beautiful photograph of her receiving from the hands of this man, who, by the way, was Italian-American, not Native American, receiving a prize from his hand. And she was very, very proud of it. So it’s, you know, it’s interesting because, of course, the cleanup kind of got co-opted by the industry, by that idea that people are the problem rather than an industry. But, you know, that’s the story of the cleanup. It’s complex. It’s not either bad or good. It’s just a strategy that was used and had some successes. But also, yeah, sometimes got its message muddled.
Anja
And I’m so glad you found Judie because she shares that story of women where, you know, they follow their husbands. And, I mean, I think you told me she married three times or so, right? She always changed her name. She always followed then her husbands. But she did actually accomplish so much herself. Thank you so much, Elsa, for sharing Judie’s story. But you’re also going to be with us next week, next episode where we continue this deep dive into the history of the citizen science beach cleanup. Maybe, could you give us a little outlook? What else will you share with us?
Elsa
So next time we’ll explore how Judie’s little pet project went global. And who else was involved in making this big event that it is today? What happened when it went out of her hands and became a project of Ocean Conservancy, this big US organization for marine conservation and how the cleanups both reflected, influenced how we assign blame, how we assign blame on producers, on consumers, and more recently, again on big corporations. And meanwhile, of course, plastic pollution keeps on growing and growing.
Anja
Thanks, Elsa. And thanks to all of you out there for listening. This was Plastisphere, the podcast on plastics, people and the planet with an episode supported by British Academy Leverhulme Small Grant and co-produced by Elsa Devienne and me. Thank you so much for being with us, Elsa.
Elsa
Thank you for having me.
Anja
All recordings with Judie were by Elsa, and you can find the link to the YouTube video of the 1984 beach cleanup in the show notes. Music is by Dorian Roy and cover art by Marvin von Stockhausen. And if you’d like to read more about this story, check out Elsa’s writings, especially her new paper titled, Elsa?
Elsa
“Making Plastics Count: Citizen Science Beach Cleanups, and the Ocean Plastic Pollution Crisis”, in the September issue of the journal Environmental History.
Anja
And you can email Elsa if you’d like one of her free copies of that article. I’ll paste her contact into the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. And next time you join a beach cleanup, please share Judie’s story so she gets the credit she deserves. That’s it for today. See you soon. Bye bye.