OVERDUE: Beach Clean Up

Over the weekend, I participated in a beach clean up in Santa Monica with the organization, OVERDUE. Overdue is a local organization that pledges to clean up LA, the beaches, mountains, and local neighborhoods. Together with a group of thirty young adults and students, we managed to collect over fifteen bags of trash and leave the beach cleaner than we found it.

We were separated it to teams of four to collect more trash over a wider area. Together, there were about eight teams each with their own trash bag, and within a few hours we had all collected enough trash to fill our trash bags. The goal of this beach clean up was not only to keep our local beaches and oceans clean for the animals and people to enjoy, but also to demonstrate the importance of keeping our planet clean and to pick up after ourselves so that we can continuously ensure clean beaches.

During my time cleaning up the beach, I noticed that the majority of the trash my team and I collected were smaller plastics. Cigarette butts, small pieces of styrofoam, and bottle caps were frequent, and they were so small that they could have been easily missed or lost in the sand. The problem with keeping the beaches clean is that most of the trash is so minuscule that it’s ignored or goes unseen, as bigger pieces of trash rarely become an issue. Additionally, small pieces of trash infect the oceans. Ocean animals see small trash as food, ingesting the trash can be toxic and deadly for the animal. Smaller pieces of trash pose a big threat to our beaches and our oceans.

My Team before the beach clean up