Items from cigarette butts and diapers to a severed goat’s head are collected in Malibu.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
Last Saturday marked California’s 25th annual Coastal Cleanup Day and a record high of approximately 14,000 volunteers scoured beaches and creek beds, from Long Beach to Malibu, to remove human-strewn debris.
“This is the biggest volunteer event in the country,” Heal the Bay staff scientist Amanda Griesbach said at one registration tent located at Malibu Lagoon State Park, where 47 volunteers had already checked in by 9 a.m. “We have 70 cleanup locations in L.A. County, with divers going underwater and people in kayaks cleaning the marinas.”
Despite the Rosh Hashanah holiday, volunteer participation increased by almost 15 percent from last year and the haul from the day’s work was nearly 70 percent more than last year’s take of 181,000 pounds countywide.
With instructions to pick up “anything that doesn’t live where it’s found,” Griesbach handed out separate bags for trash and recyclable material, latex gloves and forms on which to note the types of material gathered.
At Malibu Lagoon, volunteers walked the shoreline, carefully scanning the ground next to beginners surfing classes and sunbathers and loaded up their bags. One volunteer’s trash included crushed soda cans, deteriorating plastic bottles, countless bits of plastic foam bits that was scooped up next to mallards sifting for food, bottle caps, pens, orphaned flip-flops and enough plastic bags to carry groceries for a year.
Wading in the lagoon water yielded children’s plastic beach toys, a tube of lipstick, seven tennis balls, plastic straws, dinner plates, a rusting can of lighter fluid, fishing nets, battered boogie boards, articles of clothing, hundreds of cigarette butts and old copies of The Malibu Times.
One of the more gruesome finds at Malibu Lagoon was a severed goat’s head.
Fathers reached into the scrubby brush along the lagoon to grab long-discarded soda cans and gave them to children who were dutifully keeping track of everything found.
“What’s this?” one youngster asked his mother.
“It looks like an old diaper,” was the reply.
“Eeeeeewwww!”
Between 9 a.m. and noon, 300,413 pounds of trash and recyclables were collected in Los Angeles County by city crews, families, faith-based organizations and school groups armed with bright orange plastic bags and latex gloves, according to Heal the Bay’s report on the event.
Countywide, some noteworthy items were collected, including a dead sea lion at Ballona Creek, a restroom urinal in Dominguez Channel, an old wooden skiff on the trail adjacent to Malibu Creek and a fake mustache at Zuma Beach.
At Redondo Beach, divers found a human skull wrapped in plastic on the sea floor, causing a brief police presence until it was determined that the skull was also plastic.
There are more than 200 storm drains carrying urban runoff to Santa Monica and San Pedro bays. Removing the tons of debris goes far toward protecting marine life and preserving water quality along the coastline, Heal the Bay said.
Coastal Cleanup Day is part of an international, one-day volunteer effort to keep the country’s waterways debris-free, led by the Ocean Conservancy. California has been participating since 1985, along with 41 other U.S. states and 100 countries worldwide. In 2008, almost half a million volunteers picked up 6.8 million pounds of trash globally, spurring the Guinness Book of World Records to recognize the day as the world’s largest 24-hour volunteer event.
Participants came from as close as across the street and as far away as Riverside.
“I came because it’s the right thing to do,” Cynthia Mellon, of Glendale, said on the beach near Surfrider. “Maybe everyone on the beach will see what we are all collecting and make a point of taking their trash with them when they leave.”
“Is everything packaged in plastic these days?” one man asked rhetorically.
“You certainly become aware of the disposability of our culture,” Arthur Zimmerman, of Toluca Lake, said. “It makes you want to make the right choices when you go shopping.”
Eveline Bravo, Heal the Bay’s staff manager for Coastal Cleanup Day, said that the 1,726 pounds of recyclable material collected in L.A. County will go to local recycling centers, but that the 298,686 pounds of trash will probably end up in landfills.
“But at least our oceans are cleaner,” Bravo said. “This was our 20th anniversary of organizing this event in L.A. County. So we are very pleased that the numbers were record breaking, in terms of our volunteers and the amount of trash collected.”
More information may be obtained at www.healthebay.org