Glass Beach

Glass beach is exactly as it sounds, a beach filled with glass.  It’s located in Fort Bragg, a small town in Northern California where they threw their trash into the ocean one day and watched it roll upon the beach the next.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Packaging was a bit different back in the sea dump days at Fort Bragg.  Garbage was mainly comprised of glass and tin.  Some of the larger steel car parts and springs lay scattered upon the beach while others have found their way into rock

formations and will one day become, “Modern Fossils.” The tin has since dissolved and the glass has not.  The glass is so thick you can dig-a-dig…dig and see nothing but green, red, blue, yellow and clear glass that has been frosted and smoothed through years of friction from changing tides.

 

Some of the glass pieces have been deemed valuable based on the color and shape.  Perceived value is a funny thing, it encourages some people to take interest in something that they once believed worthless. People comb the beach like gold prospectors from California’s past looking for glass that they’ve been told is valuable.

Glass from the beach has found its way into different pockets over the years a piece at a time and the local government now fears that the glass will one day be gone ending one of the towns tourist attractions, broken glass from the trash.

 

The Fort Bragg sea dumps ended in 1967 and we have since fallen into a plastic age where cars, radios, tv’s, chairs, tables, toys, tools, utensils, glasses and bottles are primarily made of plastic.  Today, when a plastic bottle enters the ocean like the glass bottles of the past, they no longer breakup and roll onto the beach, but flake off and release toxic chemicals that harm sea life and is later consumed by us, humans. (Barry, 2009)

It seems that in our attempt to progress, we have digressed and I believe it is time to look to the past and use a packaging material that is primarily made of sand…glass.