Photos: Supplied.
BY MICHAEL JULLYAN
In 2015, we got a ‘groodle’ puppy, and being half retriever, she loves the water. We spend most mornings on the esplanade.
On weekends, many families walk and play on the foreshore beaches, and over the years, our dog has had three very nasty paw gashes from broken glass. I started picking up glass in 2016, carrying it until my hands and pockets were full, and at the same time, picking up plastics.
One day, I picked up an empty plastic container from the beach and used it to hold the glass as I collected it. It turns out a takeaway meal container can hold between 120 and 150 pieces of glass. All of a sudden, I was picking up over 100 pieces instead of 40 on every trip to the beach, which is twice a week.
I started doing the math: a minimum of 100 pieces every week, 50 weeks a year = 5,000 pieces a year for 10 years…already well beyond 50,000 pieces.
In the first three months of this year, I have collected 3,000 pieces, and this year looks like a 10,000-piece year.
At first, I thought yobbos must be having beers at night and tossing the empties, but as you study the glass, some of it is much smoother and rounded (aka sea glass), 90% is beer glass, and the rest is clear or green glass. I started studying glass migration in earnest, which is quite fascinating.
The glass is almost entirely thrown overboard from boats. The wind, wave and tide action roll the glass in a migratory direction from the south-east to the north, the same as the sand migration. The glass is light enough when it gets to the shallow water to be quickly shifted by the wave motion to the tide line, and as the tide recedes, the sloping sand of the foreshore captures the glass. If you walk out on the mud flats as I often do, you do not find glass; it covers that ground very quickly, presumably in one or two tide cycles, to accumulate on the edge of the high tide line. The coastline shape, groins and migratory motion caused by the tide – and to a lesser extent the wind – dictate several incredible local concentrations. For instance, south of the Wynnum Creek sea wall is the highest concentration by far; the second-most is where the esplanade splits. Pandanus Beach and the stretch from the wading pool to Cedar Street are relatively light in comparison.
Some of this glass is in huge jagged pieces, some sticks straight upright out of the sand, but most lies on its side, still with jagged edges exposed. Some are very small shards, but we all know small pieces of broken glass are most likely to injure.
I thought when I started bringing a container to collect glass and my daily haul exceeded 100 every time that the glass would get hard to find, but in March this year, in one weekend, I collected over 800 pieces (that’s my ‘PB’), and the first weekend in April was 430 pieces.
The glass is still there every week, and it is not diminishing! The seabed must be saturated with glass because after 10 years of collecting, and this year, we are looking at 10,000 pieces, it just replenishes.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if the 50,000-plus pieces hadn’t been picked up.
