There’s a new tool in town in the effort to reduce litter on Lake Tahoe’s famous beaches this Fourth of July weekend.
Think of it as kind of like R2D2 with a trash bag. Or the Mars Rover with a “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper sticker.
On Wednesday morning, after Independence Day crowdshave gone home from the famous Sierra Nevada lake that Mark Twain once called “the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” a remote-controlled robot will sift through the sands at Kings Beach, Zephyr Cove and other popular Tahoe beaches to pick up bottle caps, cigarette butts and other trash left behind.
The computerized custodian moves about 2 miles an hour, and is roughly the size of a riding lawn mower.
Known as “BeBot,” for “beach robot,” the remote-controlled, solar-powered, self-driving battery-operated contraption methodically sifts sand, collecting trash up to four inches below the surface that otherwise could end up eventually in the pristine alpine lake.
“We are going to try and hit as many beaches as possible,” said Chris Joseph, a spokesman for the League to Save Lake Tahoe, an environmental group that helps fund the project with another Tahoe nonprofit, ECO-CLEAN Solutions.
“July 5th is the worst day,” Joseph said. “We have been cleaning up the beaches by hand for 10 years. Most people are no longer tossing aside large pieces of litter. But things can get away, like straw wrappers from kids’ juice boxes, or cigarette butts, plastic bottle caps. When you see it all together it’s pretty shocking.”
Last year, the league and its partners conducted a pilot project with the robot, which is made by two French companies, The Searial Cleaners and Poralu Marine, and sells for about $60,000.
After canvassing 72,000 square feet between June and October on 11 beaches — including Kings Beach, Sand Harbor, Camp Richardson and Tallac Historic Site — the BeBot collected 4,497 pieces of litter. Of that, 45% was plastic pieces, 11% was bottle caps, 11% straws, 9% cigarette butts, and 8% broken glass a, 6% bottle caps, and the rest miscellaneous debris.
At Nevada Beach last July, volunteers were asked to pick up all the trash they could see over a small area. They picked up 30 pieces. The robot then ran over the same area, bringing back 300 more after it sifted through the top few inches of sand.
It didn’t work very well on beaches with lots of rocky outcroppings, but overall, the experiment was a success. The league and its partners have ordered another BeBot, which will be arriving in a couple of weeks to double their trash-collecting capacity, Joseph said.
The device also has been used to clean beaches around the Great Lakes and in Florida, including around St. Petersburg and Clearwater. In Florida, an environmental group running the machine agreed to keep the robot 10 feet away from marked sea turtle nests after local authorities raised questions about its impacts.
At Lake Tahoe, the device was given approval by the U.S. Forest Service and California State Department of Parks and Recreation, along with the Tahoe Regional Planning agency, Joseph said. Before it operates on a beach, surveys are done to make sure it doesn’t come into contact with Tahoe Yellow Cress, an endangered plant species.
Geoffrey Schladow, director of the UC-Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, said Monday that overall, the robots provide a good service by picking up litter that could otherwise pollute the lake and by educating the public about litter.
“The fact we have to deploy these (machines) highlights that users of the beaches aren’t being diligent enough in removing their trash,” he said. “The fact these robots can do it is great. But we all need to do more.”
With their big sifting tool, the robots act like Gold Rush miners. But they can only collect debris down to about .2 inches across — meaning that anything half the size of a thumbtack or smaller gets doesn’t get picked up.
Schladow, a civil engineer who leads efforts every year to monitor Lake Tahoe’s clarity and other environmental trends, noted that the machines can’t pick up tiny plastic pieces, called “microplastic.” That material comes from minute pieces of tires, plastic threads in clothing and thousands of other sources, flowing eventually into the lake, rivers and oceans, where it is sometimes eaten by fish and other animals.
“Many of these pieces of microplastic are near invisible,” he said. “What effect they have on organisms is a big area of research worldwide. It’s not just a Tahoe problem. It’s a worldwide oceans problem. It’s an area of concern.”
Two weeks ago, the BeBot completed its first-ever full cleanup of a private beach at Lake Tahoe, combing through the Tahoe Beach Club’s shoreline at Stateline, Nevada. It picked up more than 200 pieces of small litter, much of it plastic.
Joseph said that the robots also can help provide data to calculate how much of certain types of litter are on the beaches, which can lead to more effective rules and policies to reduce trash. And he said, it can help in places where funding limits mean there aren’t enough state or federal workers to regularly clean beaches.
“It’s not a silver bullet to fix all the litter problems,” he said. “But in combination with other cleanup methods it’s a helpful tool in the toolbox.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com