Surf’s Up, So’s the Garbage : Major annual volunteer effort needs support 365 days a year

Does anyone care about a Southern California shoreline that’s far more cluttered than it ought to be? The answer is yes, fortunately.

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when tide pools along Southern California’s beaches sparkled. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to see starfish, sand crabs and other marine creatures thriving along the shore. Nowadays, beach-goers are far more likely to encounter plastic bottles, broken glass and old diapers.

This high level of coastal pollution comes from many sources, including ocean dumping, much of it illegal, and storm-water runoff from street gutters.

The sad result of long abuse of one of the state’s most precious resources is that the beaches are covered with trash washed up from an ocean that increasingly is too polluted to safely swim in.

As the volunteers participating today in Coastal Cleanup Day 1992 can attest, the trash will be hard to miss.

In the Los Angeles area alone, 6,000 people are expected to descend on 29 cleanup sites along Santa Monica Bay and throughout inland areas where litter collects, such as Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, the Los Angeles River and Malibu Creek. Many others will sweep beaches from Crescent City to San Diego.

Participants in last year’s coastline cleanup collected 16,000 pounds of litter, a third of which was later recycled, in Los Angeles County alone.

In addition to gathering refuse, volunteers will collect data on the trash to help guide future coastline protection legislation.

You don’t have to go litter-picking to help our beaches. You can make a contribution by not littering the streets and storm drains--and thus indirectly the beaches--and by doing anything you can to dissuade others from using drains as though they were garbage bins.

The problem at our beaches centers on the misguided belief of too many that improperly discarded rubbish somehow magically disappears. It doesn’t. Go to the beach and see for yourself.