April 18, 2009:
Heal the Bay Beach Clean-Up in Santa Monica
Heal the Bay was having a beach clean-up on Saturday April 18, 2009, and my friend and I decided to rally some people to go with us. No one ended up showing up at 9am, so we took the bus over to Santa Monica beach and were given plastic bags and gloves. The beach was extremely clean already in the close proximity so we made an adventure out of going two miles down the beach where there is a roped off area for bird habitat. To our dismay there were piles of trash; plastic bottle caps, straws, balloons, plastic toys, etc, among the piles of seaweed. It was a little bit confusing as to why Heal the Bay did not designate the protected bird area as part of their clean-up because it takes priority over the unprotected areas.
Nonetheless, we stayed until we had picked up every single piece of trash from the area. We then returned to the Heal the Bay tents only to find them already packed up and taken away. The only thing that remained was a giant pile of about 25 black trash bags stacked up and waiting to be hauled away.
Essentially beach clean-ups are a pathetic attempt at environmental remediation. Realistically speaking there is a great pile of garbage circulating around the Pacific Ocean that is about the area of Texas and is responsible for much of the trash that washes ashore. Not to belittle the gallant effort of beach clean-ups because they’re a great way to get communities involved; however, they’re triage approaches to a greater environmental problem. In this day and age, environmental degradation needs to be handled using larger-scale techniques. Again, essentially beach-cleanups are designed to take trash from one place and put it into a landfill. In a landfill, the trash is able to further continue its degradation of the environment by leeching toxins into groundwater and being blown back into the ocean to repeat the cycle.
We achieved our goal by cleaning up the bird habitat, which I’m sure the birds greatly appreciated. However, I would be much more content to participate in a project that is responsible for massive-scale environmental remediation.
Aubrey Michi
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Nothin’ But Sand
April 18th 2009:
Santa Monica Pier
10AM-12PM
Nothin’ But Sand is a service project offered by LA Works and Heal the Bay, a non-profit environmental group. At the beach, we were thought that approximately eighty-percent of the pollution that is found on beaches come from within the city and are carried through storm drains when it rains. The storm drains were meant to prevent flooding on the streets, but the water that goes through it does not get filtered or processed before arriving at the ocean because it is from rain. Although the storm drain system works, any trash that has been littered on the streets is also carried into the ocean and then arrives on the beaches. The salinity of the ocean can kill most bacteria after three day’s time, but styrofoam, plastic and cigarette butts are not biodegradable and can damage marine life or potentially harm beach-goers. Plastic shopping bags are similar in appearance to jellyfish, seagulls can mistake pieces of plastic for clams, and the plastic on a six-pack of sodas can trap fish. To spread education about pollution and to clean up the beach, Heal the Bay has their monthly beach clean ups and short presentations prior. We were given a trash bag and a check list to mark the type of littering we found
The most common items I found littered on the sand were: large and small shards of broken glass, plastic binds and parts of coffee stirring straws, many candy wrappers (mostly the square plastic sheets), a large quantity of cigarette butts, small dead crab shells (they’re not trash because they’re biodegradable and probably died there, but there was a large amount of them that might be correlated with all the other pollution found there), pieces of styrofoam that likely came from take-out containers, and pieces plastic utensils. We were told by the coordinators that condoms and needles were also common trash items, but we didn’t find any (it would be very unsafe for any animals or beach go-ers to come in contact with those, they could catch diseases if they get cut or scraped!)
A checklist was given to us to record what we found for statistical comparisons of other beaches and what was found on their shores. We didn’t fill up our trash bags, but it was still depressing to know that our disposable consumer merchandises are floating in the sea and even more remains in the ocean than what we see washed up. I believe that littering can be prevented, or at least reduced, if people see a first hand where their disposable trash goes afterward. It is hazardous to the marine life who may mistake the trash items for food, or can inflict injuries if they swim into glass. Even the degrading of the plastic particles are unsafe for the marine life, but fortunately there is awareness and volunteer opportunities spreading. The trash pick-up itself is “end of the pipe” clean up, but by spreading awareness we are eliminating “point source” pollution by reducing our dependence on disposable items because people can see where their trash goes if they don’t properly dispose of it.
Comment by Michelle Wong June 12, 2009 @ 4:45 pm