By Neil Farrell ~
San Luis Obispo County residents and visitors turned out by the hundreds Sept. 19 to clean up beaches and inland waterways at the 31st Annual California Coastal Cleanup Day, the state’s largest volunteer event, and the amount of rubbish removed from the local environment was mountainous.
Led by ECOSLO, 981 volunteers working at 31 different sites picked up 5,273 pounds (2.63 tons) of garbage and 163 pounds of recyclable items, for a grand total of trash of 5,436 pounds, ECOSLO reported after the event.
Of interest, Melody DeMeritt of Morro Bay, a board member of ECOSLO, told the Morro Bay City Council that her group of volunteers cleaned up Morro Creek starting at the beach and going east. They picked up 300 pounds of trash, she said, and there are at least for active homeless encampments along that section of the creek. She warned that if the anticipated El Niño winter brings heavy rains all that trash will be washed down to the beach and into the sea.
She suggested that the City place five metal trashcans along the creek for the homeless to use and that the creek bed be further cleaned before winter.
ECOSLO’s cleanups took place primarily on the coast — from San Simeon Cove down to Oso Flaco Lake — and also included Lopez Lake. The annual event is part of the International Coastal Cleanup organized by Ocean Conservancy.
Among the interesting items collected were an ironing board, Panini grill and a catcher’s mask found along Morro Strand South at Hwy 41; and a Razor Scooter at Pismo Bach.
According to ECOSLO the need for such cleanups is greater than ever.
“A study published recently in Science Magazine showed that an average of 8.4 million metric tons of plastic litter enters the world’s oceans every year. That’s the equivalent of 18.5 billion pounds of plastic annually or enough to cover every single stretch of coastline around the world. The trash [some left by beachgoers but most originating elsewhere and traveling to beaches via rivers and storm drains] can have devastating effects on our state’s health, economy, and wildlife, and the ever-increasing footprint of single-use disposable plastic packaging only makes the problem larger and more difficult to manage.”
In the photos are some of the more interesting items that were cleaned from beaches. Submitted photo courtesy ECOSLO
