Thousands of kids, volunteers are tidying up these Southern California beaches as summer nears

If you’re heading to the beach for the unofficial start of summer this holiday weekend, there are a few stretches of coast that will be mostly free of debris, thanks to thousands of kids and volunteers scooping up trash.

Orange County Coastkeepers bused an estimated 1,350 schoolchildren to Huntington State Beach on Tuesday, May 21, for an early-morning clean-up, and about 4,000 kids are expected to help pluck trash off the sand on Thursday, May 23, at Dockweiler State Beach in Marina del Rey.

Both events are dubbed Kids Ocean Day.

Along with picking up trash, students form human art displays on the sand, viewable from the sky. At Huntington State Beach, participants formed the shape of a whale with the words “Protect What You Love.” The Dockweiler program also will center on love for the ocean, with students creating a heart in the sand with the message “Care For What You Love.”

In addition to Kids Ocean Day, Save Our Beach in Seal Beach held a clean-up May 18, with 400 volunteers filling two large dumpsters with trash from the beach near the San Gabriel River that borders Long Beach.

The clean-ups were more than just about tidying up the beaches for the millions of visitors expected to flock to the coast this summer. They also were an opportunity to teach students and beachgoers how trash can funnel to the ocean from inland areas, harming sea creatures and birds.

Needles, eggs and plastics

Dyana Pena, education director for Orange County Coastkeeper, tells the children participating in Kids Ocean Day that there are three big reasons to love the ocean.

First, the ocean provides about 70% of the oxygen we need to breathe, she says. Second, it’s a major source of food. Third, it’s a place to have fun.

“Being here, it’s so relaxing and zen, it’s somewhere to just think and clear your mind,” she said. “We want to bring them out to show them that if they love something, they can protect it.”

The students came to Huntington State Beach from 16 schools, an estimated 300 of the kids having never set foot on the sand prior to Tuesday’s visit.

Amber Cardenes, who volunteered to help out in her nephew Login Lerma’s class, said it’s a great lesson for the kids to learn “plastic is bad.”

“It’s everywhere. We just have to clean up after ourselves,” Cardenes said. “It’s not even summertime yet. Imagine during the summer, when there’s millions of people here.”

Picking up the trash means “we’re helping the animals survive,” said Login, 8.

Plastics were among the more common items found, but there also were some rare, and dangerous, discoveries during Tuesday’s clean-up.

Vanessa Glotzbach, who has helped with the event for four years, oversaw a group of kids that came across two hypodermic needles.

The students were prepped before the clean-up on what to do if they found needles, not a rare sight along the coast these days. They were to notify an adult volunteer, and then flag down a lifeguard to safely remove the needles.

“It’s a shame there’s people that are in a situation where they feel like they need to use needles, and then they wash up on the beach,” Glotzbach said. “We’re just more concerned with the safety of the students. We train them on what to do. When the students come in on the bus, we tell them ‘don’t touch anything sharp, dangerous, dead or disgusting.’”

Glotzbach said the needles generally aren’t used by people at the beach, but rather wash down the watershed and end up on the sand.

A more unusual find, Tuesday, were tiny eggs of a snowy plover, a near-threatened species usually found at a nearby 12.4-acre least tern reserve. Volunteers called bird experts and put caution tape around the eggs.

“They did a good job being careful,” said Cristina Robinson, an education coordinator with Coastkeeper.

Years of memorable lessons

Kids Ocean Day was started in Malibu by Michael Klubock, a sailor who tired of picking up trash during his ocean outings.

He started going to schools in the Los Angeles area more than two decades ago, delivering slideshow lectures on how trash on the beach hurts wildlife and the negative affect of trash moving down inland storm drains to the ocean.

Then, kids would get their hands dirty during beach clean-ups.

Kids Ocean Day, last year, celebrated 25 years, with an estimated 160,000 students going on field trips to the beach to take their lesson beyond the classroom.

It’s the little pieces of trash that can cause the most damage, Klubock said. The tiny plastics, including cigarette butts made from plastics, can break down into snowflake-size debris and end up in the stomachs of sea creatures, he said.

Klubock said he hopes, through the first-hand experience, that kids will remember where trash ends up if it’s tossed into the street, even if they live miles from the coast.

“They are getting their feet in the sand and they are experiencing it,” he said of children going to the beach for the first time. “They’ll say, ‘Wow, this beach is really cool.’ They’ll remember this.”