life guard 26 - Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
10 pounds
739.8 pounds total
I pulled over before driving into the beach parking lot to grab this plastic bag. If you look along the curb in the picture to the square cement patch in the grass, you will notice a hole in the sidewalk at the edge of the street. The bag would have probably ended up in that storm drain. I could get the bag now, or later, I thought. The beach was close, but I saved the bag a trip.
I really don't know what to say about straws. Well, I do. I find too many off them. Do we really need them? If I did feel like I needed a straw, couldn't I find the time to buy a reusable one made from stainless steel? I tell you what, I've never found one of those on the beach.
Plastic straws...I've found countless.
With two minutes left in the collection for the night I noticed this beach chair. I was going to walk right by, but then I asked myself why this broken chair was not also trash? I didn't want it to be trash, I didn't want to carry it across the sand, and neither had the owner who once it had gotten crushed, didn't want to haul it off of the sand either.
So I grabbed it. I took it to the parking lot, weighed it and realized that I was going to have to take it home to deposit it in the dumpster behind our house. If I left it next to a trash can, wouldn't it be almost the same thing as abandoning it on the sand?
Was not too thrilled to put this chair in my car. How had it gotten crushed into the fully open position in the first place? I quickly moved on to another thought....
The chair came home with me, added 8.2 pounds to the night's collection, and ended up in the dumpster.
"emotional incentives, when combined with economic incentives, present a formidable team for biodiversity conservation" - Wallace J Nichols
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