Young Volunteers Turn Back the Sands of Grime

Ivan Castro, 13, could have slept in Saturday morning. Instead, he got up at 6 a.m. to catch a chartered bus to Dockweiler State Beach, where he joined a corps of young workers clearing trash.

“It’s kind of fun, because I’m with my friends and teacher,” Ivan said as he and several classmates from John Adams Middle School near downtown Los Angeles combed the sand for candy wrappers, plastic cups and bottle caps.

The students had plenty of company. Nearly 2,000 youngsters descended on Dockweiler to do their part for the annual International Coastal Cleanup Day.

Organized by the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, the mega-cleanup effort turned out more than half a million volunteers in all 50 states and 90 countries to clear beaches, rivers, creeks and lakes of debris ranging from cigarette butts to castoff refrigerators.

At Dockweiler, one of 50 cleanup sites in Los Angeles County, second- and third-graders from 109th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles were lugging rapidly filling plastic bags--green for recyclables, blue for the rest. Their teacher carefully noted each piece of debris collected on a tally card.

“We’re doing this so the trash won’t get in the water and the fish won’t eat it and die,” said second-grader Stephany Blanco.

“And so the beach won’t be so dirty,” added Rashund Jimerson, a third-grader at 109th Street.

Shaine Collins, 14, of Hawthorne--helping his sister, Taylor, 8, lug their full bags to a check-in point to be weighed--said they showed up to “help our community.”

Volunteers followed the same basic drill at all sites, breaking into teams of three to five each and picking up trash swept oceanward through the storm drains or left behind by careless beachgoers. They noted everything they collected on detailed data cards, which the Center for Marine Conservation uses to help track the sources of pollution and to lobby for environmental legislation.

Saturday’s effort in California alone yielded 451,520 pounds of trash and 46,979 pounds of recyclables, according to the California Coastal Commission, which oversees the efforts in the state.

A commission spokeswoman said cool, overcast weather in Southern California probably contributed to the drop in the numbers of volunteers--about 45,000 statewide. Last year, about 50,000 showed up for the cleanup day.

Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay, which coordinated the Los Angeles County effort, turned out 7,500 volunteers at its cleanup sites, including more than 35 beaches and parts of the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek.

The volunteers collected a record 51,711 pounds of trash and 5,000 pounds of recyclable items, said Heal the Bay spokeswoman Alix Gerosa. She added that the inland sites--especially Ballona Creek--yielded a lot of the trash, including a dismantled car recovered from Malibu’s Medea Creek and a cooked pumpkin and eggs from the Los Angeles River at Atwater Village. Another point along the river yielded a large bag of empty champagne bottles.

“Somebody partied hard,” Gerosa said. At the environment’s expense.

Heal the Bay made Dockweiler the site of a special effort to get youngsters involved in caring for the beach and other marine environments.

“Kids are going to inherit this, and we want them to learn early to be good stewards,” said Guillermo Jaimes, 22, who led the Dockweiler project.

The morning began with the arrival of close to 50 buses carrying youngsters from schools throughout the county. After a talk that included safety instructions--don’t touch dead animals, broken glass or sharp objects--the youngsters received surgical gloves, plastic bags and data cards.

When they found a dangerous object (one child found a hypodermic syringe), they traced a circle in the sand around it, so county sanitation workers could find the item later.

The Dockweiler site provided some extras for the young volunteers. Heal the Bay tried out part of its new hands-on marine environmental education program, “Key to the Sea,” on some of the youngsters, and county lifeguards provided ocean safety demonstrations.

Once they had turned in their morning’s haul of debris, the youngsters got caps and lollipops from See’s Candies and juice and snack bars from Odwalla. Radio Disney chipped in with post-cleanup entertainment.

The gray skies and chilly breezes did not seem to dampen young spirits--an after-cleanup announcement that youngsters were allowed to go into the ocean was met by loud cheers.

For some of the volunteers, Saturday’s cleanup excursion was their first trip to the beach.

“It’s cool!” pronounced Michael Cobos, 9, a fourth-grader at Hawaiian Avenue School in Wilmington.

“The waves are white, and the sand is nice and soft and clean,” he added. Michael got his first look at the ocean when he arrived that morning with classmates in LA’s BEST, an after-school enrichment program offered at his and other Los Angeles Unified School District campuses.

Isabelle Barcenas turned 9 on Saturday and said she was happy to mark the occasion by cleaning the beach.

“It feels like a birthday party,” she said, looking around at all the kids romping in the sand.