Killer App

It’s hard to gross out Cindy Zipf. Three decades of cleaning up beaches have inured her to the horrors of, say, a washed-up diaper. But there’s one kind of trash that Zipf, executive director of the New Jersey-based marine protection coalition Clean Ocean Action, really can’t stand: plastic tampon applicators. During a 2014 cleanup of some 70 beaches, Zipf’s team found about 3,000 of them. Plastic applicators are so common, in fact, that kids on the beach often pick them up, thinking they’re toy whistles. “We call