Mother Earth probably needs a good lawyer, but she can always – always – use good volunteers.
If you have time, you can help with California Coastal Cleanup Day, the statewide event aimed at cleaning up the Golden State’s beaches, coastlines, lakes, rivers and streams.
The effort, which also involves collecting a lot of trash and debris, is aimed at restoring the environment and protecting the coast and the Pacific Ocean, said Marianne Butler, a director of the Solano Resource Conservation District in Dixon, in a press release.
At the local level, cities, sanitation departments and Solano County will join RCD for the 40th annual event on Sept. 21. Since Cleanup Day was established in 1985, approximately 1.8 million volunteers have helped remove more than 27 million pounds of trash from thousands of miles of California’s beaches and inland coastlines.
On September 21, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., authorities nationwide will conduct over 50 cleanup operations and the RCD will coordinate everything.
More than 2,500 local volunteers participate in Solano County’s Coastal Cleanup Day events each year, Butler said.
They meet at streams, in parks, open spaces, city trails and “trash hotspots” and work together to remove thousands of plastic cigarette filters and thousands of pounds of plastic bottles, single-use food containers and packaging, grocery bags and more, she added in the release.
For a complete list of partners and community cleanup efforts in Solano County, visit cleanupsolano.org.
County cleanup organizers are mindful of the environment and are striving to reduce the waste generated by the cleanup itself. To that end, they are asking volunteers to bring reusable cleaning supplies such as work gloves, water bottles or buckets “to help keep trash out of the sites they work,” Butler wrote. If volunteers are unable to bring materials, supplies will be available at each site.
She pointed out that the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta runs along the southern border of the Solano River and diverts more than 40 percent of California’s runoff water into the Pacific.
Without measures like Coastal Cleanup, trash and chemical pollution from county residents flow into sewers and other waterways, eventually entering the Sacramento River, Suisun Marsh, Carquinez Strait or San Pablo Bay, and then flowing into the Pacific Ocean. An estimated 80 percent of the plastic in our oceans comes from cities. Removing this trash upstream — from city streets and streams — helps prevent trash at its source, protect birds and other marine life, “protect our food chains while beautifying local communities,” she added.
Butler said Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers contribute to the world’s largest database of plastic pollution on land and in the sea. This database is used to develop pollution control measures, such as the plastic bag and straw bans enacted in California over the last decade.
And the Solano Project – the state’s largest annual volunteer and data collection event – is part of a statewide effort involving more than 1,000 sites across California.
For those who want to invest more time in cleaning our coastlines, the Coastal Commission launched a self-guided program in 2020 that allows participation throughout the month of September. Last year, more than 45,000 volunteers dedicated their time to September cleanups, including time spent at the cleanup sites themselves on Coastal Cleanup Day.
