Here's my wife's summary of a discouraging cleanup on this Berkeley, CA beach. The currents that come through the Golden Gate and Bay dump a lot here. Homogenized plastic bits... very disturbing...
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While waiting for the line to move, I picked up a couple of pieces of plexiglas and a candy wrapper, nothing much there on the way down the trail. We wandered off along the berm looking out at the sandpipers and willets wading in the shallows and the chips of wood, sticks, leaves and seaweed marking the high tides. The tide was way out on this calm sunny morning.

When we chose a place to clean, I sat down on a log and really looked at the surface in front of me. It seemed impossible that so many pieces of plastic could be mixed into the natural components of any beach. The talk had not prepared me for what I saw. At my feet were hundreds of small pieces of man made materials, almost all plastic. (See how many you can count in the 1 square foot photo at the top.)

Soon we were tallying the trash. Thousands of drinking straws, plastic bottle caps, pieces of candy wrappers, brittle chips of plastic bottles, styrofoam, cigar tips, spent shotgun shells, and of course, plastic bags of all types. Could this be the future of the world, beaches where bare feet run on plastic? Never in all my beachcombing have I found anything like the volume of plastic on that beach. Even a few hundred people working hard for three hours could not rid this spot of the horrible plastic bits and almost none of it was recyclable.