Friday, October 8, 2010

Day 160 - Oct. 7, 2010

lifeguard tower 26 - Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
.5 pounds
645.3 pounds total

COMMUNITY COLLECTION DAY 58
Mark Armen - The Bait Tank & Danielle Richardet - It Starts With Me
Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA
trash collected for 20 minutes
1.7 pounds
400 pounds total

On the right is my friend, and local environmental entrepreneur with a passion for sharks and saving fish, Mark Armen. If you haven't looked at his cigarette depositories that are reducing cigarette butt liter by 60% where they are currently installed in Santa Cruz and Capitola, then go check out his site. The Bait Tanks will soon be up on the Santa Monica Pier too! Yay Mark!

My friend Danielle contacted me in June after she opened an email from OCEANA about their OCEAN HERO AWARD. She felt inspired to email me, and our friendship began!

When she was out over the summer to visit an old college roommate with her family (3 amazing kids, and husband Aaron), they did a beach cleanup with me.

As I type this they are picking up cigarette butts after lunch on Wrightsville Beach N.C. near where they live in Wilmington N.C.. Danielle has started a portion of her blog called, OUR DAILY OCEAN where she picks up cigarette butts from her local beach. She just got a text that Aaron, Chase, Claire and Henry picked up 403 cigarette butts in 20 minutes.....

She has collected 6,346 cigarette butts in 12 days. Time to ban cigarette smoking from the beaches in N.C.? It won't stop all the butts from getting in the ocean, but well...how can it not help???
I'm a little off my game these days. My brain fatigue has reached an all time high from editing my brains out for hours at a time on my desktop for the past couple of weeks. I must apologize for the picture quality of the photos in this post. They come to you courtesy of my crappy cell phone camera instead of my digital camera that I left at home with my brain when I left the house.

BUT I had to include the above photo even if it is out of focus because if you read how many pounds of trash we collected today you may be thinking, "Wow, an improvement!"

It's not.

We spent 20 minutes feeling overwhelmed at the confetti of plastic peppering the tide line. Most of the trash we collected tonight was the size of a bottle cap or smaller. That's still a big problem. Ah rain in LA breaks down the trash that dumps out of the storm drains and invades the coastal water.
Bottled water giving to the Rainforest Action Network is great! But bottled water is not. All I will say is please oh please see the documentary by Stephanie Soechtig (local hero) TAPPED.
Please oh please oh please watch this. I don't like to beg...