Trash Busters : Their Mission? Ridding Beaches of Tons of Litter

They serve as curators of one of Los Angeles’ greatest natural resources, toiling without recognition to protect a much abused treasure.

But when Melvin Knowles starts up his tractor each morning and begins sifting through the sands, he never thinks about the millions of people who view his work. His focus is much narrower. Just clean the beach. Visitors may come and go, but the beach is always dirty.

For the maintenance crews that clean Los Angeles County’s fabled beaches, the routine never changes. After several hours of sweeping and raking and plucking tons of trash along 28 miles of the coastline, the sands from San Pedro to Malibu are nearly spotless.

And by the time they return to work at 5 a.m., another 20 tons of garbage has piled up along the shore.

“The challenge of cleaning the beach every day is huge,” said Carol Ayers, beach maintenance district supervisor. “We’re always rushing, always hustling to clean it up. It’s an endless job.”

Just ask Knowles. For 23 years he’s been running heavy rakes, bulldozers, “sanitizers” and other esoteric equipment over Los Angeles’ famed beaches. He’s seen the sands littered with refrigerators, stoves, couches, airplane parts, boats, tires, knives, pants, prophylactics, animal carcasses, and just about everything that could be flushed from a storm drain or creek into the ocean. Even a few dead bodies. It all ends up on shore.

“I’ve seen pretty much everything a person could find,” he says. “One time I saw this guy laying there and so I made a circle (with the tractor) around him and I’m thinking, he sure looks dead. And when we called the police, sure enough, he was dead. Yeah, I guess there isn’t much we haven’t seen.”

Or as Ayers puts it: “The ocean coughs up some pretty strange things.”

The actual garbage hasn’t changed much over the years. About 70% of it is the plastic remains of discarded cups, bottles, food containers, bags and the like. Anything a person might associate with a day at the beach. Knowles says the only noticeable difference is the decrease in cigarette butts, a possible sign of health awareness among the trash-tossing public.

Wayne Schumaker, chief of the safety and sanitation division of the county’s Department of Beaches and Harbors, said that a hot holiday weekend in Los Angeles can result in up to 50 tons of seaside garbage. And the amount of garbage found on the beach continues to go up, from 2,800 tons collected in 1988 to 4,000 tons last year.

Using an arsenal of high- and low-tech tools, the maintenance workers stage a full-court press involving a series of sweeps with rakes and modified potato pickers, known as Sand Kings, to pick up the debris. A convoy of four-wheel-drive garbage trucks follows to empty the 3,000 trash cans on the sand. The tough spots, such as the areas around homeless people, the sand fences and the lifeguard towers, are picked up by hand.

Occasionally, different equipment is brought in after winter storms, when storm drains overflow and Mother Nature burps back large foreign objects onto the beach. But rain or shine, the trash trackers roll out around dawn and go through their paces until the beach begins to fill up by late morning.

About the only thing that can disrupt the routine is an equipment breakdown, which happens fairly frequently due to the constant exposure to moisture and sand. Schumaker said the department spends about $200,000 each year for maintenance of the heavy vehicles.

“If we don’t have a machine, we don’t have a job,” Knowles said.

Ayers said that, although it can be frustrating knowing that each morning the crews will be greeted by a new mountain of trash, they take a lot of pride in their work.

“It’s nice to know that when you go home, you’ve done a good service for a lot of people,” she said.