Green Daily

The Ocean Conservancy have announced the results of their shoreline clean-up day last September, and if's official - we're disgusting.

378,000 volunteers in 76 countries and 45 US states scoured 33,000 miles of coastline and came up with more than 6,000,000 pounds of garbage. Over the course of a single day, they picked up more than 7 million items, ranging from food containers to plastic bags to discarded fishing lines.

The biggest single form of beach pollution was "smoking related materials" which included 2.3 million cigarette and cigar butts and filters. That's about 36 miles worth of butts if you laid them out in a straight line, which would at least look a little tidier than tossing them onto the beach.

While butts are one of the biggest pollutants, they're not quite as immediately dangerous to birds, fish and animals as plastic and fishing line, which often kill wildlife that become trapped in them. However, since cigarettes contain nicotine and other poisons, they take a slower but equally deadly toll on animals that mistake them for food.

Of course if you leave crap on the beach long enough, eventually it winds up here, which is even worse...

via [AP]