More than 100,000 beads landed on the shores of Ski Beach and Incline Beach from inside the ruptured plastic dock, estimated Colin West, the executive director and founder of the nonprofit Clean Up The Lake.
A couple dozen volunteers joined the clean-up. Typically, the team can be found scuba diving and removing trash from below the lake’s surface, but this time they had to get creative. For example, the holes in cat litter scoops were too big, so some switched to pasta strainers while others used shop vacs and other tools. West said the methods looked like that of an Olympic curling team.
“We had someone with a leaf blower blowing, and two people with shovels quickly throwing up the dirt, sand, snow, and plastic beads in front of the leaf blower so that the light Styrofoam would blow against the back of a tarp, and then we came in with a shop vac there and got it,” West said.
West would like to see more regulations so this type of incident doesn’t happen again.
“There are federal agencies, state, and local government that are in a position to further regulate what is allowed on Lake Tahoe, or their own bodies of water, or communities,” West said. “This isn’t the only time that we've seen plastic distribution into the environment through weather and wind.”
West applauded the City of South Lake Tahoe’s new rule to ban single-use plastics, which fully goes into effect this spring. Lake Tahoe has some of the highest concentrations of microplastics in the world, according to a 2023 study.
Clean Up The Lake removed roughly 90% of the Styrofoam beads, but the rest were covered by snow. West said he’s brainstorming how to remove the remaining beads once the snow melts because he’s worried about fish and birds mistaking the trash for food.