What’s the Most Polluted Harbor in America?

by Kimball Livingston, Blue Planet Times
Polluted? Surely not Marina del Rey. But, out of tests performed in ten harbors in America, on the day of the Rozalia Project’s testing in Marina del Rey, that spiffy enclave four miles north of LAX, and just south of hot, hot, hot Venice Beach, rang the bell as the most polluted harbor in America.

We’ll have to add qualifiers, so don’t stop reading here. But if you care about Marina del Rey, you need to know.

Because, yes, we’re talking about the Marina del Rey that was created in the days when any car worth having sported tailfins to the stars. Home over the years to the yachts of the stars. Also the nation’s largest man-made pleasure-boat harbor with more than 4,000 slips, according to the Los Angeles Times, or, according to MarinaDelRey.com, home to “more than 6,000 recreational boat slips, the highest density of restaurant seating in a one-square-mile area outside of New York City, and boat launching ramps that provide access to over 100,000 trailer-class boats annually.”

In its best moments, it’s just lovely.

The nonprofit Rozalia Project has devoted recent years to testing waterways on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, trawling with a standardized, replicable system and then counting what’s there besides water. Plastic, for example. Plastic, especially. They’re not analyzing toxicity; they’re measuring a volume of trash, including tiny trash. (Including even the tiny-tiny-tiny beads of plastic used in many of the facial exfoliants on the market. Those exfoliant beads go down the drain, and then they go guess where.)

Rozalia Project director Rachael Miller reports that the team’s tows in Marina del Rey “produced a count of 282,000 pieces of trash per square kilometer. That’s an incredible amount. Even our tows on the East River didn’t match that.”

Tows near Point Loma, in San Diego Bay, produced a count of 21,000 pieces of trash per square kilometer, less than ten percent of the count on test day in Marina del Rey. – Read on