Enhancing Stewardship and Sustainability

The Gulf of Mexico has a productive, diverse, and beautiful coastline. Unfortunately, it is not immune to the impacts of marine debris. Marine debris in the Gulf of Mexico ranges from large concentrations of litter (i.e. cigarette butts and plastic bottles) that find their way through the storm drains to the beaches to large 190-foot derelict vessels that disturb marshes and seagrass habitats. The NOAA Marine Debris Program aims to prevent and reduce marine debris in the Gulf of Mexico through education, research, removal, and response to large debris events. We can accomplish our goals through productive and meaningful partnerships with state, local, federal and non-governmental organizations.
Learn more about the overall coordination efforts taking place in the Gulf of Mexico, including prevention, removal, research, monitoring, emergency response, education, and more!

Established in 2016, the Mississippi Coastal Cleanup Program (MSCCP) is an educational non-profit organization that promotes the conservation of the marine environment by influencing active stewardship within the community.
The MSCCP was formed with the mission of preventing and removing litter from the coastal environment through education, outreach, research, and cleanup events. The goals of this program are to: (1) increase awareness of the local and global marine debris (and terrestrial litter) issue by connecting with and involving the public; (2) implement educational presentations to advance community environmental literacy; and (3) acquire litter data from Mississippians by the means of citizen science.
Since its establishment, MSCCP has seen over 14,000 volunteers collect over 70,000 tons of litter from Mississippi beaches and waterways. While these cleanups are beneficial for the local environment and research efforts, to defeat marine debris, we have to stop it at its source. To this end, education has become a critical step. Along with performing community cleanups to showcase the amount of litter in our local communities, MSCCP educates K-12 students on the issues associated with litter and marine debris as well as ways they can help. MSCCP also attends outreach events with hands-on activities to make learning about marine debris an engaging experience. This presentation will highlight each of these components of the program.

Commercial seafood industries face numerous challenges, including an aging workforce, severe weather, and varying regulations. One less obvious but significant threat is marine debris, which includes any persistent solid material manufactured or processed and then disposed of or abandoned in marine environments. Shrimpers in Mississippi encounter marine debris in 19% of their tows, with 79% involving derelict crab traps. These interactions cost the Mississippi commercial shrimping industry nearly $1 million annually due to lost fishing time, reduced catch, and an additional $78,000 in gear damage. In 2019, a team of natural resource professionals developed a derelict crab trap removal incentive program for shrimpers in the Mississippi Sound. In the first three years, the program successfully removed 2,904 derelict traps from the northcentral Gulf of Mexico at an average annual cost of $35,595, or $53 per trap.
The emerging off-bottom oyster aquaculture industry along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast faces similar debris challenges. The gear used, mainly plastic, is vulnerable to storm damage and displacement. Farmers often try to "sink" their gear ahead of storms to prevent loss, but debris still accumulates around these farming areas. As such, the areas surrounding off-bottom oyster farming locations can often be littered with derelict gear and other debris that is hard for farmers to find due to thick vegetation or distance traveled. To address these issues a team of commercial fishing, outreach, extension, and research professionals from Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United and Mississippi State University have continued the Derelict Trap Reward Program; built upon the Derelict Trap Reward Program to incentivize collection of plastics and other types of marine debris by shrimpers and other commercial fishing industries; and developed and pilot a derelict gear mapping and recovery program that incentivizes off-bottom oyster aquaculture farmers to recover and reuse gear.

SWAMP+ (SWAMP Plus) is a collaborative effort among Discovery Hall Programs - Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Mobile BayKeeper, and USA's College of Engineering that engages local area high school students in monitoring water quality and microplastic abundance in Mobile area waterways. In the classroom, students receive information about water quality, waterborne debris and microplastics as well as training in microscope and laboratory skills. Students travel to multiple field sites in their school's watershed several times over 2-4 months and collect water samples, returning to school to conduct analyses. Students record, analyze, and discuss their data with team members. The year-long program culminates in student projects which illustrate their understanding of the waterborne debris and microplastics issue in their local waters.



In Year 1, 34 students from an underserved high school in the city of Mobile participated in the year-long program. Three field sites were routinely sampled for 3 or 4 months (depending on the class). Microplastics concentration ranged from 0 to 36 particles per liter with fibers being more common than fragments in most samples. In Spring 2024, an additional high school (suburban) was added but students were only able to participate in training and one field day.



Pre-post testing results indicated that students learned more about water quality and pollution through the project. Evaluations indicated that students valued the field experience and hands-on activities the most. Student engagement and voice was integrated by allowing student choice in the capstone projects. Interestingly, artwork and infographics were most frequently chosen though student work also included letters to municipal officials. Although we are not able to prove students are engaging more in sustainable practices involving plastics (reduce, reuse, recycle, volunteer), surveys indicated that they would be more likely to follow these practices after having participated in the program.

In collaboration with Mississippi Coastal and Inland Cleanup programs, SWAPS and Plastic Free Gulf Coast are documenting brand data on the branded plastics gathered during cleanups and summer camp lunches(2021-ongoing). The data collected during cleanup plastic brand audits is used to identify the top plastic polluters in our cleanup areas and can identify possible interventions to reduce plastic production and use before it becomes waste.
The audit data collected during the Maritime and Seafood Museum Sea and Sail summer camps gives us a way to identify consumer brand use and also identify areas of intervention and quick solutions to the amount of single-use plastic packaging that is in our student lunches. As consumers, avoiding plastic products is near impossible, and no matter how hard we try to avoid it, recycle it, reuse it - it will never be enough. As professionals we can do cleanups every day all day and never make a dent in the problem of plastic pollution. Ending plastic pollution means ending plastic production and brand audits are a tool to support that effort.