Coastal Cleanup Day with Heal The Bay
September 2018
SERVICE DESCRIPTION
Coastal Cleanup Day is the world’s largest volunteer day to protect our environment. We will be collecting trash from our beaches, along with thousands of volunteers across LA county. Trash in our oceans has reached unsustainable levels. The growing patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean is now as large as Texas. Let’s do something about it.
For our September event, resisterhoodLA partnered with Heal the Bay for Coastal Cleanup Day!
EVENT RECAP
As a marine biologist, worrying about the oceans is something I do on a daily basis. For the second year in a row, the organization I have paired resisterhoodLA with is Heal the Bay – a nonprofit in Los Angeles with the goal of educating the public on how to make our beaches cleaner. We participated in International Coastal Cleanup Day and our volunteers joined over 13,000 Angelinos to remove the largest total of trash in event history – over 40,000 POUNDS of trash in just 3 hours. The hardest thing is that this 40,000 pounds is made up of smallest pieces of trash – fragments of Styrofoam, cigarette filters, Starbucks drink stirrers. So imagine 40,000 pounds of full garbage bags that are so light anyone can carry them. 20 TONS of Styrofoam and cigarette butts make one giant pile.
What can we do to help?
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It’s not just straws and plastic grocery bags. We need to start saying no to all extra trash
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Getting takeaway? Decline on the extra utensils and sauce packets
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Are you a regular to a business? Ask them to consider non-Styrofoam containers
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Does it seem weird that International Coastal Cleanup Day is once a year? Heal the Bay hosts beach cleanups every month – check out their events page (https://healthebay.org/events/2018-10/)
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Want to help the beach through politics? Heal the Bay encourages LA voters to say Yes to Measure W to help reduce direct storm run-off in to the bay. THE NUMBER ONE SOURCE OF GARBAGE!
Contributed by Ben Tully, microbiologist, scientist, & educator.
ABOUT HEAL THE BAY
Heal the Bay is an environmental nonprofit dedicated to making the coastal waters and watersheds of Greater Los Angeles safe, healthy and clean. To fulfill our mission, we use science, education, community action, and advocacy.