You Won’t Believe What This Small Seaside Town Made Out Of 17 Tons Of Discarded Beach Trash

Residents of a quiet Oregon coastal settlement turned years of accumulated ocean waste into free recreational spaces that now draw visitors from across the Pacific Northwest.

For more than a decade, the 2,300 residents of Netarts, a tiny fishing town tucked between coastal cliffs and a sheltered bay in northern Oregon, faced a recurring, frustrating problem at their annual community beach cleanup. Every summer, volunteer teams would comb 7 miles of local shoreline and drag back hundreds of pounds of discarded plastic shovels, broken surfboards, deflated inflatable rafts, cracked foldable chairs, waterlogged buoy fragments and frayed waterproof awning pieces that had washed in from the Pacific. The local county waste management program charged the town 120 dollars per ton to haul all this mixed waste to a regional landfill, and the total annual disposal cost ate up nearly 15 percent of the town’s tiny parks and recreation budget. Last March, when the community held its first post-winter cleanup and pulled more than 2 tons of waste out of tide pools and sand dunes in a single weekend, a retired local architect brought up a casual idea at the post-cleanup potluck that would end up rewriting the town’s entire environmental playbook.

The idea was simple: instead of paying to bury perfectly usable processed plastic and rubber waste, residents could sort, clean and compress the suitable materials into solid, dense building panels to use for new public amenities around town. No fancy industrial equipment, no complex chemical treatments, and no outside corporate funding would be required. The town council voted to divert 40 percent of that year’s landfill disposal budget to test the plan, and local small manufacturing shop Coastal Custom Plastics offered to lend their industrial heat press for free on weekends for the entire project. Over the next five months, more than 1,700 local residents signed up for 2-hour volunteer shifts to sort through the piles of recovered beach waste, rinse off salt and sand, separate flexible plastic from hard resin and rubber fragments, and stack prepared pieces into marked bins for processing. The team quickly realized they could mix different ratios of materials to create panels with different properties: a higher ratio of shredded surfboard foam made soft, impact-absorbent pieces, while a mix of hard plastic toy fragments and old buoy shells made ultra-durable, weather-resistant slabs.

By the end of October last year, the community had processed all 17 tons of pre-collected beach waste, and used the resulting 3,200 custom molded panels to build three separate public play areas along the Netarts bay shore, plus 27 new public benches, 120 feet of padded buffer barriers for the popular coastal hiking trail, and 36 waterproof storage lockers for local surfers to leave their gear overnight near the beach access points. The entire project cost 28,000 dollars total, which works out to less than a third of the money the town would have spent sending all the waste to landfills and buying new standard plastic playground equipment and park furniture from commercial suppliers. Local parents say the new playground slides, molded from hundreds of crushed broken surfboards, feel far softer under contact than standard store-bought plastic slides, and minor tumbles no longer leave kids with scraped knees even if they fall off the edge of the play structure. The padded barriers along the hiking trail cut down the number of minor fall injuries on the uneven cliffside path by 70 percent in their first three months of use.

Word of Netarts’ weird, wonderful waste project started spreading across Oregon’s coastal communities last November, when a local travel blogger posted a short video of the new playground on social media. Over the past six months, representatives from 11 different coastal towns in Oregon and Washington have visited Netarts to tour the facilities and ask the small project team for a copy of their sorting, processing and construction guide. The small local plastic shop now takes in sorted beach waste from three neighboring towns once a month, and no community in the local waste cooperative has sent more than half a ton of beach plastic to landfills in the first quarter of this year. The town hosted its first “Bay Trash to Treasure” community open house in mid-July, and more than 7,000 day trippers from across the region showed up to test the new playgrounds, walk the shoreline trail, and learn how to sort beach waste properly. Local park staff noted that the number of pieces of litter left on the public beach dropped 82 percent over the weekend of the event, as almost every visitor left carrying a small bag of stray plastic bits they picked up during their walk.

The Netarts town council unanimously approved a new two-year plan last week that will expand the project even further. Over the next 24 months, volunteers will collect and process another 22 tons of recovered ocean plastic to build a 3-mile fully accessible pedestrian and bike path that runs parallel to the shoreline between the town’s main fishing dock and the popular nearby state park. The new path surface will not get hot to the touch even in peak summer temperatures, unlike asphalt, and will be soft enough for bare feet, stroller wheels and bicycle tires to roll over without slipping. The project team has also posted a full, free downloadable copy of their complete operations manual on the town’s public website, with no patents or usage restrictions, so any community anywhere in the world can copy their methods without paying fees or waiting for special approval. Project coordinators say they do not expect their small town to single-handedly solve the entire global ocean plastic problem, but they hope their example will show other small communities that environmental action does not always require huge grants, fancy technology or complicated international agreements, and that the waste people see piling up on their local beaches can easily turn into something that makes their home a nicer place for everyone to enjoy.