For my family, summer means daytrips to the Lake Erie’s many shores and beaches as often as we can manage it. And while you can’t beat a day at the beach enjoying the sun, the surf, and the sand, one thing we don’t enjoy much is the trash we often find there.
A Rochester Institute of Technology study notes that the United States and Canada together discard roughly 22 million pounds of plastic into Great Lakes waters. Up to 80 percent of the litter on beaches — straws, cigar tips and plastic bottle caps — comes flushed through city storm drains. Even as people become more aware of plastic pollution and decide to forgo straws and disposable water bottles, trash is still piling up on beaches, and breaking down into microplastics that fish and birds can ingest.
While we carry out everything we bring with us for a day at the beach, we try to grab all the miscellaneous trash we come across during the day as well. Still, we wanted to do more to help keep our nearest Great Lake, well, great.
So we recently joined a large-scale beach clean up effort at Edgewater Beach. The event was hosted by the Greater Cleveland Aquarium’s Splash Fund in conjunction with the Drink Local Drink Tap organization, which works to protect drinking water locally and around the world. Although we weren’t quite sure what to expect, we slathered on sunscreen, packed a picnic, and headed to the beach in time for the 10 am event. Once we arrived, the helpful volunteers provided buckets, gloves, and checklists to tally our finds. Then we hit the beach to start cleaning up.
Two hours later, our group of 115 volunteers picked up more than 115 pounds of trash in two hours. That’s roughly one pound of trash per person! Items collected included 976 cigarette butts, 277 plastic bottle caps, 267 straws, over 830 cigar tips, and nearly 2,500 small plastic pieces. “We did an excellent job removing so much trash from Edgewater Beach;” Elizabeth Maille from the Greater Cleveland Aquarium shared. “However, I think we were all able to see firsthand how much more of it remains, and how much of a need there is for future cleanups.”
You may have noticed something in the headline about being rewarded for giving back, and I’m happy to explain what that meant. In addition to the awesome feeling of helping keep a beautiful place litter-free, and aside from the wonderful example you’ll be to your kids, every person who volunteered their time received a free admission ticket for the Greater Cleveland Aquarium, valid for 12 months from the beach cleanup date. This gives you and your friends and family the chance to see, up close, some of the cool creatures who appreciate clean beaches and water even more than we seasonal beach-goers do.
If you’d like to help out, the last scheduled beach cleanup of the season will be held on Saturday, September 28th at Perkins Beach at Upper Edgewater Park in Cleveland from10am to noon. For more information, or to register for the event, visit http://greaterclevelandaquarium.com/event/adopt-a-beach-cleanups/.
Since the Aquarium opened in 2012, the Splash Fund has led beach cleanup efforts each summer. Over the years, they have hosted 31 events with 425 volunteers who collected nearly 1,400 pounds of trash and recyclables. Like all Splash Fund initiatives, Adopt-A-Beach cleanups are a community effort, carried out in collaboration with the Alliance of the Great Lakes, Cleveland Metroparks, Greater Cleveland Aquarium and hundreds of concerned Northeast Ohioans eager to make a difference.
