Greetings from DC!

MJB-2010-photoshop-picToday’s blog comes from our Director of Development & Marketing, Morgan Justice Black, who along with another member of the ILACSD team, are in Washington DC this week for the Keep America Beautiful conference.

 

 

Hello from a chilly Washington, D.C. Even though it may only be 25 degrees outside, we are having a great time at the Keep America Beautiful National Conference learning more about how affiliates throughout the US create vibrant communities through community beautification, litter prevention, waste reduction and recycling! We made it to D.C., despite blizzard warnings and having to sprint through the Philadelphia airport to make our connection. And once we arrived…it was snowing! Quite a change for the two of us, both born and raised in San Diego! Well, the conference kicked off with a keynote address from Peter Kageyama, the man who has written two books about loving your city. How perfect, since we have a little fondness for the word “love” too! He spoke about the importance of gathering people together to interact casually in the outdoors. Can you guess where the most social place probably is in your city? The dog park!

Last night was the awards dinner, and I have to say that ILACSD certainly cleaned up! We were up and down accepting three…yep…three first place awards! And we have the pictures to prove it!

Natalie Roberts, Morgan Justice Black and Keep America Beautiful COO Becky Lyons with out awards!
Natalie Roberts, Morgan Justice Black and Keep America Beautiful COO Becky Lyons with our awards!

Our awards included first place for our Cigarette Litter Prevention Program, a program that we implement in San Diego in partnership with the Surfrider Foundation’s Hold onto your Butts program. Over the last five years, we’ve installed and maintained more than 100 ash receptacles in San Diego, helping make a dent in the amount of cigarette butts picked up during cleanups! In fact, in the areas that we’ve done this program, cigarette litter has decreased by an average 64%! This was a well deserved award for Natalie and her team in the Community Events Department!

KAB pic 3
Natalie accepting the CLPP award from KAB staffer Bronwen Evans.

 

Next, ILACSD was the recipient of a storytelling award, and this is the first year that this award category has been offered! Keep America Beautiful judges sifted through dozens of promotional materials, media articles, social media messages and more to identify five affiliates who are doing best at telling their story of building better communities. This is a true team win for us, as every member of the ILACSD team is involved in writing blogs and contributing to our social media!

Morgan, accepting the Storyteller Award from KAB staffer Mike Rosen, who was celebrating his 3rd day on the job!
Morgan, accepting the Storyteller Award from KAB staffer Mike Rosen, who was celebrating his 3rd day on the job!

The most exciting part of last night was the final awards category, the National Affiliate Awards. ILACSD was honored to receive First Place and awarded “Affiliate of the Year”. The plaque might not fit in our suitcases, but it will make it back to San Diego eventually! This award is truly an honor, since ILACSD has been an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful since the 1970’s. In fact, at breakfast today a man came up to me and told me how proud I should be to be part of I Love A  Clean San Diego because we were (and still are) a pioneer in the environmental movement! Back in the 1970’s, there were less than 50 KAB affiliates nationally, and we were the only one in California. Now there are more than 600 affiliates, and although I am biased, I have to say that we are one of the best!

So cheers from Washington, DC and thanks to all of our supporters for being part of our success!

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Now it’s time for a nap…this three hour time difference is killer when the conference starts at 8am local time!

 

Recycling Behind the Scenes: Ramona’s HHW Collection Facility

Amanda (left) & Barbara - ILACSD's Recycling Hotline Team
Amanda (left) & Barbara – ILACSD’s Recycling Hotline Team

Meet our hotline team, Amanda and Barbara! If you have every called our recycling hotline (1-800-237-BLUE) or visited our online database, www.WasteFreeSD.org, you can thank them for keeping recycling and household hazardous waste information up-to-date. They often recommend the Ramona HHW Collection Facility but recently realized that they had never actually been to the site themselves! Today, they’re giving us a behind the scenes look at how Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) is collected and disposed of.

 

Call 1-877-R1-EARTH to make your appointment!
Call 1-877-R1-EARTH to make your appointment!

On a cool Saturday morning in December, we visited the Ramona Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) Collection Facility for a behind the scenes tour. The HHW facility is available to residents in the unincorporated areas, and it is 1 of 10 facilities that operate in San Diego County. Properly disposing of household hazardous waste is one of the best and easiest things you can do to protect our environment from toxins. We’ll take you through the whole drop-off process step-by-step!

Keep in mind the details on the drop-off process can vary from location to location, but should be generally the same countywide.

Common HHW items: paint, automotive fluids, fluorescent tubes, cleaning products, batteries and gardening chemicals.
Common HHW items: paint, automotive fluids, fluorescent tubes, cleaning products, batteries and gardening chemicals.

Common household hazardous waste items include: paint, automotive fluids, fluorescent tubes, cleaning products, batteries and gardening chemicals – all of which can be disposed of at this facility! If you’re looking to dispose of any of these items, give us a call at 1-877-R1-EARTH to make an appointment.

 

After you’ve called us to schedule an appointment, head “up the hill”, as they say, to Ramona on your scheduled day and time.

When you arrive to 324 Maple Street, you’ll see Ramona Disposal. Enter the main driveway, head left and go past the half circle driveway where you can drop off regular recyclable items.The driveway will head around the building to the right, and it will take you straight into the line to drop off your hazardous items! Next you simply wait in line (if there even is one!), pull up to the proper spot, turn off your vehicle, and the helpful employees will unload your hazardous items. You don’t even have to get out of your vehicle!

After you are on your way to a relaxing Saturday with your hazardous items safely left behind, here is a little more info as to what happens to your hazardous waste:

–  All of the hazardous items are stored nearby, and picked up as space is needed, typically about once a month.

– There is a chemist on site to ensure that all hazardous items are moved and stored safely. If you have an odd item, you may always call us on our recycling hotline and we can work with you to find a solution to safely dispose of your item.

– As much as possible is recycled (like paint and motor oil), although some items do need to be disposed of at a hazardous waste landfill.

Check out our Clean and Green board on Pinterest to swap out some of your HHW for non-toxic items!
Check out our Clean and Green board on Pinterest to swap out some of your HHW for non-toxic items!

This seems like as good a time as any to give a friendly reminder to avoid toxic products as much a possible! Check out our Pinterest board that gives recipes to make your own natural products, or head to your local natural foods store to buy environmentally friendly cleaning products. There are also helpful guides available online to ensure you only buy the amount of paint needed for your home projects. Only buying what you need will help you avoid waste and save you a trip to the HHW Collection Facility.

Keep any eye out this spring for a blog post highlighting how to “green” your home!

Did you resolve to volunteer in 2015? Join us for our 1st cleanup of the year!

Lexi, Community Events CoordinatorToday’s blog comes from our Community Events Coordinator, Lexi! If you have volunteered at one of our cleanups there is a good chance you’ve listened in on one of her safety talks and witnessed her passion for the environment first-hand. Read on to learn more about why you should join her this Saturday, January 17th for one of our most unique cleanups of the year!

Looking to put a spin on your next beach cleanup? Help us comb through the sand at Torrey Pines State Beach on Saturday, January 17! This is the first of our 2015 Tsunami Sweepers Cleanups, a series of volunteer events with a goal of tracking debris from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the eastern coast of Japan.

When the tsunami waves hit coastal Japan in March of 2011, an estimated 5 million tons of debris washed out into the Pacific Ocean. Of the 5 million tons, the Japanese Government has approximated that 30 percent of it—1.5 million tons—was buoyant enough to travel out into the ocean via wind and water currents.

Over the next several years, Californians should expect to see an increased volume of debris washing ashore—and some of it has traveled very, very far to get here. Thankfully, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) anticipates no elevated level of radiation in any of these items that may have originated near the nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

Bits of polystyrene foam, commonly referred to as styrofoam.
Bits of polystyrene foam (commonly referred to as Styrofoam) never fully degrade and easily mix in with rocks and sand. This is harmful to marine life as they often mistake it for food.

Thanks to the California Coastal Commission, we will be providing volunteers with data cards at these cleanups so that they can search for and track possible debris from this disaster. What will this debris look like? Some expected items include construction debris like lumber or building materials, consumer debris with Japanese characters or text, fishing gear, and polystyrene foam (Styrofoam).

Think it’s easy to identify these items and trace them back to Japan? It may be more difficult than it sounds. Even if our volunteers find large volumes of polystyrene foam debris, it can be challenging—and maybe even impossible—to be able to track it back to Japan. After all, our volunteers find polystyrene foam litter at many of our other cleanups, too.

But we purposefully selected Torrey Pines State Beach as the location for this event. NOAA has estimated that any tsunami debris that does wash up this far south down the coast will hit Torrey Pines, based on water and wind current patterns.

IMG_0493The California Coastal Commission funded a round of these cleanups in 2013, and more than 5,400 volunteers hit beaches up and down the coast to hunt for tsunami debris. While it has been challenging to confirm that any of the items found originated in Japan, many suspicious items have been found, including building materials and lumber with joinery more common to Japan than to US construction.

Volunteers are still needed for this event. To get involved, contact Lexi Ambrogi at lambrogi@cleansd.org or 619-704-2778. Hope to see you there!

Check out what ILACSD accomplished in 2014!

Today’s blog will be short and sweet. We’d like to extend our sincerest thank you to everyone who made our 60th anniversary in 2014 a year to remember. Checkout the infographic below to see exactly what YOU helped us accomplish this year. We can’t wait to see what awaits us in 2015!

ILACSD_Infographic

Kids’ Ocean Day Migrates South this Winter!

Erika-teamToday’s blog comes from our Education Coordinator and Kids’ Ocean Day extraordinaire, Erika! Each year, ILACSD invites students to see first-hand how pollution negatively impacts our ocean as well as the opportunity to send a powerful message to the greater San Diego community through aerial art – but this year there is a twist. Read on to see what’s new about this year’s Kids’ Ocean Day and how you can get involved!

What does it look like, when 1000 students, teachers, and volunteers come together to actively conserve the environment? This:

2014 Kids’ Ocean Day aerial art formation
This is the image of the 2014 Kids’ Ocean Day aerial art formation.

 Join us Thursday, February 26th from 8am – noon at Border Field State Park!

For the past 12 years, I Love A Clean San Diego has participated alongside 5 Californian cities to celebrate World Oceans Day through Kids’ Ocean Day; a program funded by the California Coastal Commission. This is a multifaceted event, starting with an ocean conservation assembly, then students have the opportunity to take action through a beach cleanup, and can educate others by creating a message that can be seen from the sky.

microplastics_TheGuardianThis couldn’t be happening at a better time. Right now, our oceans are in trouble. Data show our oceans are inundated with trash, specifically plastic pollution. Each of our five major gyres has garbage patches; our local North Pacific Gyre has three. Microplastics, which create a plastic soup in our oceans, are found to absorb chemicals in the ocean, creating a cesspool of toxic waste animals cannot escape. Millions of animals die annually of starvation, with bellies full of plastic. Now is when we need a change. Now is when we need help. We need help to keep our oceans alive.

albatrossAfter educating students on information like the Pacific Garbage Patch and Midway Atoll, I find that most students immediately want to make a change and take action. Kids’ Ocean Day provides this opportunity. This year, we are taking it a step further. This year, we are expanding our program to include not one, but two nations. The ocean is one thing that connects the global world, so we feel like we should act globally through a bi-national Kids’ Ocean Day. Students from both sides of the border will be participating in a beach cleanup and then will create an aerial art image that spans two countries. This year’s image celebrates the ocean while asking for help. It is a message from the ocean, which will read “Unite por el mar” / “Unite for the sea!”


UNITE POR EL MAR!

At this time, we are still in the process of recruiting volunteers. If you are interested in helping and celebrating the ocean, please contact Lexi at lambrogi@cleansd.org. Unite por el mar!