Queen Annes County opens up boat shrink

STEVENSVILLE — Boats on the Chesapeake Bay are synonymous with summer, but during the winter they need to be stored and that comes with its own issues. There is one county that is looking to make storing a boat a little greener.

Most boat owners will store their boats on land during the cooler season and parting of the storing process is to have it covered with a single-use plastic shrink-wrap. So as the weather warms up, people and boats look to shed the layers as they get ready to hit the water. While we can put away our winter layers, boats cannot ‘put away’ their shrink-wrap layer.

"You think about when you drive past the marina or you drive past the boat yard and you see these big boats with plastic wrap, nobody ever thinks about what happens to that plastic come springtime when it starts to get removed and everybody's ready to start splashing their boats," says Phil Dumenil, a Queen Annes County Commissioner, highlighting all of the plastic on winterized boats.

Plastic Free Queen Annes County, a nonprofit organization, along with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Queen Annes County opened the recycling program to the public for the first time. This was done so that the public can also recycle their shrink-wrap and reduce the amount of plastic waste in our landfills.

Sara Shelley, Executive Director for PFQAC, explains just how much waste would be reduced from reaching our landfills every year. "So, our organization brought everybody together for conversations that we then sent a proposal to the commissioners. And I had met with our Commissioner Dumenil back in the spring a year ago to talk about the problem because in our county alone it's estimated around, and it's a conservative number, 30 tons of shrink-wrap go into each year. Just in our county alone, unless it's recycled," says Shelley.

Given the estimated amount of plastic waste, this was the main reason organizations wanted to open up the recycling program to more than just the marinas.

If you are interested in participating in the program to recycle your shrink-wrap, you can purchase the special bags from West Marine in Chester, Maryland. While the recycling bags cost $15, this is just to cover the transportation of the plastic to the recycling center.

"Recycling is not free. It's not cheap. This is a difficult material to get ready for recycling, transport for recycling, and then actually recycle. So, the way we work it is we sell bags for them to put their used wrap into and those bags cost $15 dollars and that covers our cost to come back and collect the wrap," reiterates Donna Morrow, a Program Manager with DNR Chesapeake Bay & Coastal unit.

For those that purchase a bag, you will notice some instructions that come along with it. This is an important step that cannot be missed if you look to recycle your wrap, so a bit of cleaning prep must happen before stuffing it into the bag.

While the bag has instructions and can even navigate you to a YouTube video of how a wrap should be cleaned, Eric Kinder, the Service Manager at the Bay Bridge Marina, shows how simple it can be.

"So, when you’re doing a removal here, you start by cutting your belly bands here. Then, you only really need to cut about an inch of this out that contains this poly banding. Trace it all around, you do that first before you do anything else and it makes the rest of it go easy."

The rest of the prep includes removing windows, doors, zippers, and rivets so that the shrink-wrap can be properly recycled. This is so that when it is at the recycling center being shredded, it does not have metal contaminating the plastic.

If you would like more information on the program you can read more here on the Maryland DNR website.

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