life guard tower 26 - Ocean Park Santa Monica, CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
1 pound
821.8 pounds total
Susan, her son Simon and me
trash collected for 20 minutes
4.45 pounds (including one garden shovel with wooden handle and metal trough!)
842.55 pounds total
DAILY OCEAN COMBINED TOTAL - 1,664.35 pounds in - 387 cleanups
Susan and her family joined me for a beach cleanup Sunday night. I really like it when people are interested in coming out to the beach with me. It was their family's second beach cleanup of the weekend since COASTAL CLEANUP DAY was the day before. Here's an impressive stat. -
11,000 PEOPLE COVERED 86 MILES AND REMOVED 22 TONS OF TRASH SAT. SEPT. 17
The next morning after I took this shot, I was out in the water behind this very beach and found more balloons. I swam past the sets to the two green deflated balloons, grabbed them, swam back, popped them, and tucked them into my rash guard for later disposal. Balloons are not a party for the ocean. Animals mistake them for food, eat them, and get sick or die.
A question that Coastal Cleanup participants at Venice Pier asked me more than once as I was weighing in their findings for Surfrider was, "Where do we mark down Styrofoam? (on the CCD data card that Ocean Conservancy wants handed out to volunteers)"
answer - they don't have a place to mark Styrofoam.
I find this odd.
We instructed that they mark Styrofoam under plastics, but really O.C.?
Let's acknowledge one of the most pervasive and polluting kinds of trash out their in the marine eco-system.
Styrofoam - if balloons look like jelly fish, don't you think that broken down bits of Styrofoam double nicely for fish eggs?
And fish eggs are food for just about everyone out there....birds, other fish...it's a long list.
Why do we make efforts like Coastal Cleanup Day? See the photo above.
It takes each one of us, one step at a time, one pick up at a time to keep our world from being buried in garbage.
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