International Coastal Cleanup 2009 at Lake Pleasant

On Saturday, September 19th, CNUW and SCC Green Club volunteers stepped out of the desert to help conserve the coasts as part of the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup. Armed with trash bags and gardening gloves, five of us drove up to Lake Pleasant Regional Park to clean up as much garbage as we could.

From right to left: Education Coordinator Jean Rigden, Sustainability Coordinator Thomas Williams, John Yu, Kellie Elliott, and Grants and Projects Coordinator Emma N. Olsen. Photo by E.N. Olsen/CNUW.

We arrived just after 8:00 AM, and our work was clearly cut out for us. Even in the parking lot we removed hundreds of cigarette butts, dozens of plastic bottles, and innumerable food wrappers and utensils. As we moved down toward the water, our finds became progressively more bizarre and more disgusting.

Thomas bags a filthy piece of carpet. Photo by E.N. Olsen/CNUW.

Kellie wields an abandoned baseball cap and the string of trash and organic debris that has become attached to it. Photo by E.N. Olsen/CNUW.

Over the course of about four hours, we continued to remove trash from along the shoreline. Some of our most interesting finds included a pair of glasses, a stuffed toy rabbit, an Arizona license plate, several pairs of underwear, and a bleach jug filled with dead bait fish. The vast majority of what we found, though, was food-related trash: fast food wrappers, soda cans, beer bottles, plastic forks and spoons, and many other types of food packaging.

John clears away two handfuls of food wrappings. Photo by E.N. Olsen/CNUW.

For a while, it was depressing to see just how much trash had been dumped onto the beach. As we worked, however, passersby would stop to thank us. I like to think that, by seeing us working hard to clean up a mess we hadn't made, the people at Lake Pleasant would at least think twice before tossing their garbage onto the ground or into the water.

John, Emma and Kellie with some our trash bags. Photo by E.N. Olsen/CNUW.

MCTV also came out to do a story about the Cleanup and to help raise awareness about littering and how it damages the environment. The segment aired on the October 3rd, 2009 segment of Maricopa Now!, which you can see here.

By the end of the day, we had filled 9 trash bags with nearly 500 pounds of garbage. It seems like a drop in the bucket, but that's 500 pounds of garbage that won't injure wildlife, poison water, or spoil the beautiful views at Lake Pleasant. We worked hard and I think our efforts paid off. I'm looking forward to the Cleanup again next year!

Emma