Plastic waste turns Hawaii's Kamilo Point into "trash beach"

It was another beautiful summer Sunday across much of the Aloha State today, but not all was perfect in paradise. Carter Evans on the Big Island shows us why. Hawaii is home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world with picture-perfect shorelines, but it's pictures like this no one expects to see. We're here at Kamilo Point, and it is unaffectionately known as Trash Beach. From car parts to shoes, nothing surprises volunteer cleanup organizer Megan Lampson. This place is like a catchment system for trash. The whole Hawaiian archipelago sort of acts like a sieve and captures a lot of the floating debris. Globally, 18 billion pounds of plastic waste end up in the ocean every year. That equates to five grocery bags of plastic trash sitting on every foot of coastline around the world. That looks like it's from Asia. In just one afternoon recently, a group of volunteers picked up more than 1,400 pounds of trash off this beach, but they were only going for items larger than a bottle cap. That means all of these microplastics were left behind. And it turns out this is some of the most dangerous debris for marine life. This to me looks like evidence of bite marks, so something that was out there was taking bites of this bottle and trying to ingest it. When animals eat these microplastics, they can end up in our food supply. It was very striking to me when I moved out here how much plastic was in the sand. I just want to come out with tweezers and like, you know, pick every little piece out. And it's impossible to do it by hand. So a group of Canadian engineering students came up with a solution. It's essentially a sand sifting vacuum that sucks up and separates microplastics. They recently tested the prototype on Camilo Beach. How did that go? It went really well. It's the best, the best, most innovative microplastic marine debris machine that I've seen yet. Still, these volunteers say the one thing that would make the biggest difference is if people reduce the amount of plastic they use. Do I think that beach cleanups are going to solve this problem? No. Carter Evans, CBS News on the Big Island of Hawaii.