Ever find one of those little green things?

Minor mystery solved -- sort of.

Eva Browne, the head of the Asharoken Conservation Board, who led a beach cleaning effort this month along the north shore of the town of Huntington, mentioned that many of the volunteers, as in past years, reported finding small, green objects a little less than two inches long.

For example, a new volunteer this year – William Berg, a dentist who heard Browne speak at the Northport Rotary – cleaned Makamah Beach and found 10 of the brushes. It was the first time that beach was cleaned under the program, part of a statewide effort, because no one had previously volunteered in that area.

Others found larger numbers along Sound beaches in Asharoken. One family reported finding 80 of them, for example, and close to 250 were reported overall, according to Browne. She had shown them to someone from the American Littoral Society, who identified them as something used to clean pipes at a power plant.

Diana Parisi of KeySpan said this week that about 14,000 of the little pipe cleaners are forced through condenser pipes at the utility’s Northport power plant every night for 110 nights during the warm months from May to September. They clean algae out of the pipes, helping the plant to run more efficiently.

“Our goal is that we don’t want these to escape into the environment.” Parisi said, adding that the utility does everything it can to collect – and reuse – the cleaners. She also said that 14,000 trips a night for 110 nights gives the brushes more than 1.5 million chances to escape.

And she also raised the Connecticut question.

"I’m not trying to say that they’re not ours, because I did say that we do use those green brushes,” Parisi said, “but there are other power plants along the Long Island Sound. That could potentially be from them too.”

Meanwhile, Browne had a final tally from the cleanup, which occurred over a few weekends: 251 volunteers of all ages collected and recorded 2,343 pounds of garbage.

To read past stories about the cleanup, click here and here.