Cal State Monterey Bay participated in the annual California Coastal Clean Up day Saturday, with Save our Shores, collecting 48.5 pounds of litter and 7 pounds of recycling. This is a continuous partnership with the university and organization.
Del Monte Beach was one of 57 cleanup sites around Santa Cruz and Monterey counties where members of the community came out to pick up trash on Saturday. There was a collective 7,562 pounds of debris picked up in three hours at all the sites working with Save Our Shores.
“Our goal is to educate our students and the community about how to keep our shores clean, to keep trash off the beach, to understand our impact on the environment, how we can help change culture and our use habits because things that we use can end up in our natural habitat,” said Jeffery Rensel, director of the Otter Student Union.
The day started around 9 a.m. with 27 student volunteers preparing for the clean up. Before everyone started the clean up, there was a safety debrief from Rensel. Reminding students to be aware of wildlife and leave any organic sea life alone, the plan was to pick up only human-created litter.
“I have done some beach clean ups in Chicago and really loved it. Coming here I was excited to do it because I feel like we take our environment for granted, honestly,” said Dylan Brown, a third year marine science major. “There’s a lot of people out there that will just throw their trash around, littering. And I just want to do my part and help out.”
Once the safety debrief concluded, students were asked to group up with three to four other people. Creating groups gave the students designated roles, as they were given a bucket, gloves, grabbers and a data sheet.
Save our Shores clean ups have data forms that are distributed at beach clean ups, to monitor what is the most common piece of litter. They had eight categories with different pieces of litter under each one, for example the biggest category was, most likely to find items and under that were plastic bags, bottle caps, food wrappers and cigarette butts, among other things. The data collected provides insight on solutions to reduce types of waste.
There were two waves of students who came to the beach through university transportation and community members joined the clean up, equalling 42 volunteers that day. Everyone had about two and half hours to pick up trash.
“We made it about a half a mile or a mile on the beach, we were going up and shore from the shore to more inland and probably mainly saw general plastics, cigarette buds and glass, ” said Madeline Moeller, a third year sociology major.
At 11 a.m. all students reconvened with Rensel, to collect all the trash students picked up into their buckets. After students handed over their trash, they had the opportunity to grab snacks and mingle with other volunteers. In that time the trash was weighed and the overall data was collected. To wrap up the day, students were picked back up with campus transportation in the groups that they made throughout the clean up.
Brown said, “I’ve been trying to get more involved in college life cause this is my first kind of actual college experience… That’s why we are here today, to get to know other people and help out.”