Join Aimee Edmonds and her family as volunteers for this year’s Creek to Bay Cleanup, and help protect our coast!
When Aimee Edmonds’ daughter’s American Heritage Girls troop chose our Creek to Bay Cleanup as their spring service project, she had no idea she would soon be bringing together not only the troop, but also her church, to clean up the area around their local elementary school. While looking around the Creek to Bay website for a cleanup site for the AHG troop Aimee said, “I quickly narrowed my search to Mira Mesa on the Creek to Bay website and there discovered ILACSD’s outstanding need for a Creek to Bay site in none other than…Mira Mesa!”
Mira Mesa, and specifically Hage Elementary School, is where Aimee and her family attend Newbreak Church, so she knew that the area was in need of not only litter pickup, but landscaping and painting projects. Aimee immediately reached out to our Community Events Department and signed up as the site captain for Mira Mesa. As the site captain, Aimee will receive training and supplies for her site from ILACSD and then will lead the volunteers the day of Creek to Bay.
When we asked Aimee why she though events like the Creek to Bay Cleanup were important she said,
“A clean San Diego is a visible expression that we as residents responsibly care about and appreciate our community where we live and breathe…Serving others is cross-generational and cross-cultural as it builds character in our youth, adolescents, and adults. The next generation is taught how to be good stewards of the things in which we are entrusted.”
Site captains like Aimee are the heart and soul of the Creek to Bay Cleanup, we could not mobilize 6,000+ volunteers at 92 sites across the county – all on one day – without them! Aimee says, “I look forward to bringing people together to help meet real needs at Hage Elementary. We want to show their administration, staff, teachers, students and families we value them as we come alongside them.”
Thanks Aimee and all our other site captains for the great work that you do as an extension of the ILACSD staff!
Today’s post comes from ILACSD’s Community Events Intern, Gabe Grinstein.
Volunteers up bright and early to cleanup up the Morning After Mess!
Already this morning, 227 volunteers came out and joined I Love A Clean San Diego by Belmont Park in Mission Beach for the Morning After Mess cleanup. After having the day off yesterday to celebrate Independence Day, there was no better way to start off the day than with a beach cleanup to recover all the mess from yesterday’s festivities. It was an early start for me, getting up at 7 so I could get to Belmont Park by 8 to start setting up. To be honest, I started quite slow since I was very tired, but I woke up once people started to come by and sign up. The mood was great around the volunteers as there were many eager people ready to participate, and we had 94/9 radio right next to us playing music and advertising our organization and event on the radio.
Volunteers combed the beaches picking up cigarette butts, plastic bags, bottles, and more.
Time always flies by during events since it becomes so busy. I didn’t clean up any trash, but I weighed the trash and recycling bags, and added tally-marks to the big board to show how many cigarette butts, plastic bags, styrofoam pieces, and other items that we collected. By the end, we had marked 8,260 cigarette butts! This is an astonishing number since one cigarette butt can contaminate up to one gallon of water, so thankfully we picked them up before they reached the water.
Gabe keeping track of trash as it came in.
Volunteers also picked up 80 plastic bags, 134 styrofoam pieces, 345 pounds of trash, and 130 pounds of recyclables. People began to leave after a couple of hours and we started wrapping up around 11:30. The end is always my favorite part of the cleanups because I get to see all of the smiles of people when they turn their bags in. I can always see a sense of accomplishment on the faces of the volunteers. It is a great feeling knowing that we bettered the environment we live in, even if it wasn’t our mess.
I Love A Clean San Diego and other local nonprofits are at it again, hoping to make this summer the cleanest on record at some of our most popular beach destinations. As hundreds of thousands of people look to descend on local beaches this summer, I Love A Clean San Diego, FreePB,org, and Surfrider Foundation are working hard to make sure the beaches don’t bear the brunt of what thousands of people leave behind…trash! As part of the Clean Beach Coalition, our organizations work together to remind our community to be aware of the amount of trash they make, and also place temporary trash and recycling bins at the most popular beaches during popular holidays like the 4th of July.
Even with the added trash and recycling bins, inevitably some trash still ends up on the sand. If you’re sick of your favorite beach getting trashed, you can do something about it by volunteering at the Morning After Mess, scheduled for Thursday, July 5th at 9am! ILACSD will be hosting our cleanup site at Belmont Park in Mission Beach. Contact Jemma De Leon at jdeleon@cleansd.org or 619-704-2778 if you are interest in participating or have any event questions.
Our thanks go out to the sponsors who helped make this year’s campaign a reality!
Think Blue – City of San Diego Stormwater & Transporation Department
Pacific Beach Shore Club
Lahaina’s
Keep California Beautiful
Car2go
Vavi
ClifBar
BarWest
Paradise Point Resort & Spa.
Many people will look at this picture and squint at it thinking, what is that?
“Are those rocks?” is a common question we’ve heard since releasing this picture after last week’s Kids Ocean Day. The design is definitely not made of rocks, or shells, or even trash from a cleanup. This amazing image is a piece of living art made up of over 1000 people. Yep, those are local San Diego students, parents, volunteers and the ILACSD staff sitting on the sand at Crown Point Shores sending a message to the rest of San Diego to ‘Defend the Sea.’
Kids Ocean Day is how we here at I Love A Clean San Diego get kids involved in celebrating World Oceans Day each year. This amazing work of art started as just an idea a few months ago, and was brought to life by ILACSD’s Environmental Educator, Alex Mullen-Ley and Education Coordinator, Samantha. Our staff were up before the sun last Thursday, mapping out and drawing Alex’s design in the sand.
As the buses began arriving, 3rd-5th grade students from 8 local schools started the day by cleaning up the beach, finding cigarette butts, beverage containers and small pieces of plastic.
The excitement started to build as we began lining the students up to file into the aerial art and the news helicopter started circling overhead. It was amazing to watch our octopus come to life piece by piece as the students and volunteers started to fill in the lines of the image. Most of the kids had never been a part of anything like this and were very excited to find their place in the sand.
Last but not least, the I Love A Clean San Diego staff sat down to form the eye of the octopus.
The second helicopter arrived, carrying our friend and photographer Rachel Lebowitz from Outside the Lens, another local nonprofit that teaches youth to use digital media to create change within themselves and their community. We were so impressed at how well behaved the students were as we waited for word from Rachel that she’d gotten the perfect shot!
Kids Ocean Day was coordinated in 5 cities in California, all using the theme ‘Defend the Sea’ in their designs. Click here to visit the Ocean Day website and see all of the amazing aerial art images!
Today’s post comes from ILACSD’s Marketing Intern and USD student, Maddy Blake. Updated 5/3/2012 with new totals!
ILACSD’s Staff ready for the big day!
I Love A Clean San Diego celebrated its 10th annual Creek to Bay Cleanup this past Saturday, April 28th. An amazing 5,800 San Diegans joined together across the county to preserve and beautify their local environment. This year also marks the San Diego Girl Scouts’ 100th anniversary, over 1200 of scouts took part in the cleanup to show their commitment to the environment and witness the effects that pollution has on their communities.
Volunteers separated trash and recyclables.
Thanks to all of these fantastic volunteers, San Diego is a much cleaner county. In fact, more than 150,000 pounds of trash and debris were removed from local parks, canyons, creeks, bays and beaches in the span of just three hours! As in years past, cigarette butts and plastic bags were among the most common items found, but this year, some of the most interesting items our volunteers picked up were a rocking horse, a bowling pin and a five-gallon container of pickles.
Daisy scouts pitch in at Creek to Bay.
With a total of 88 cleanup sites, the most we’ve ever had for Creek to Bay, there was somewhere for everyone to go and something for everyone to do. This year, cleanup events were held at five brand new sites in communities we hadn’t reached yet:
Paradise Hills – 40 volunteers filled an entire roll-away dumpster of debris
Spring Valley – 49 volunteers collected over 260 pounds of debris
Santa Ysabel – 20 volunteers removed 200 pounds of debris
Banker’s Hill – 49 volunteers removed 250 pounds of debris
University Heights – 32 volunteers can boast removing 1,200 pounds of debris
You read that right, at the site known as Camelot Canyon (the area beside the 163 at the Vermont St. bridge in University Heights), volunteers picked up 1,200 pounds of debris in that three hour timeframe and unfortunately there is more work to be done in that area. The site was brought to our attention by local University Heights resident, Alison Whitney, who bikes past the canyon on her way to work everyday. With the help of CalTrans and ILACSD, Alison organized this cleanup to make this corner of her community a little more enjoyable for local residents. Click here to read Alison’s interview with KPBS.
Just a sample of some of the debris picked up.
While about 40% of this year’s cleanup sites were in coastal areas, cleaning up inland sites like Camelot Canyon ensures that the trash will not travel down the watershed systemand end up in our waterways, bays and the ocean. Furthermore, by expanding into the five new sites, an additional 2,000 pounds of debris were removed from the environment! After ten years, I Love A Clean San Diego still dedicates itself to county-wide programs and expanding its reach even farther to preserve and ensure a healthier San Diego for everyone.
Volunteers painting over graffiti near Fashion Valley Mall.
Picking up trash is not the only activity our volunteers participated in – many sites included other beautification projects such as graffiti removal, mural painting, native planting, brush maintenance and other general park maintenance.
Don’t forget – if you joined us at Creek to Bay this year, remember to submit your favorite photo to ILACSD for our Sony Volunteers In Action photo contest! Photos are due on May 4, 2012, then the top 3 photos will be posted on our Facebook page, where our fans will vote for their favorite. The winner will be announced on May 18th! Click here for more details.
We want to thank ALL of the volunteers who took time out of their weekend to do more with their morning at the 10th Annual Creek to Bay Cleanup! We’d like to give a special thank you to the following volunteer groups who came out to show their love for a clean San Diego:
Local members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormon Helping Hands Service Day
For many years, Bob and Jan Rogers saw a need for beach cleanups and public awareness about clean water in their local community. Since 2004, the couple have been site captains at Beacon’s Beach for ILACSD’s annual Creek to Bay Cleanup and have even involved their family in the fun. “When we first started with the beach cleanup program, our sons were part of the volunteers cleaning the beach. They are now married and our son, Jesse, and his wife work as our bilingual co-captains. Our son, Randy, and his wife, Virginia, also help out as volunteers – they now have a daughter, Sierra, and she is also part of the beach cleanup crew.”
Because the family spends so much time together at Beacon’s Beach (and it’s Bob’s favorite surfing location!), they realize the importance of keeping the water clean and safe and value being a part of this volunteer effort every year.
One of the main goals of the Creek to Bay Cleanup is for residents to gain a sense of ownership of the local environment, especially by teaching the next generation of San Diegans the importance of keeping our community clean. Bob and Jan say, “It’s a great learning experience for the kids. A friend of ours brought her son to Beacon’s years ago and now wherever they go to the beach he picks up trash. They are the stewards of the environment.” The Rogers family also encourages all of the volunteers at their site to bring their own reusable supplies, like gloves and buckets, so that they aren’t producing more waste by using plastic bags and latex gloves at the cleanup.
All of us here want to thank Bob, Jan and the entire Rogers family for dedicating their time each year to cleaning their local beach and spreading awareness about the importance of keeping San Diego clean to their community!
The Rogers Family!
What motivated you both to volunteer with ILACSD?
We moved to Leucadia in ’96 and saw the need for beach cleanups and public awareness about clean water. We love the beach and feel we all have a responsibility to give back.
How long have you been volunteering with ILACSD?
In 1998 we organized our first beach cleanup at South Pontos. Surfriders sent us to Coastkeepers and from there we made contact with ILACSD. With each group we’ve met friends that share our interest in the environment.
How long have you been a site captains for Creek to Bay?
We have collected some of the posters from our beach cleanups. After checking the posters we figured we began around 2004.
Have you always been a captain at one particular site?
We captain Beacon’s Beach for Creek to Bay, South Pontos for “Day After the Mess” and back to Beacon’s Beach for the Sept. Coastkeeper International Beach cleanup.
Why is that site important to you?
This is our neighborhood beach. It attracts families so we get a lot of children at the cleanups. Bob also surfs Beacon’s.
What is your favorite part of participating in the Creek to Bay cleanup?
The returning people that come back year after year and the kids.
Why do you think cleanups like Creek to Bay are important to keeping San Diego healthy and clean?
It’s a vehicle for getting the word out about keeping beaches and our waterways clean. It’s a great learning experience for the kids. A friend of mine brought her son to Beacon’s years ago and now wherever they go to the beach he picks up trash. They are the stewards of the environment. It’s a great event.
What is the strangest piece of trash you’ve found at a Creek to Bay Cleanup?
Led Zepplin album and a jar of pickles (?). In the future, it would be nice to see no balloons, cigarettes and plastic trash bags. Also, volunteers bringing their own supplies to cut down on the debris we generate.
We love doing this. It is so rewarding.
Registration for ILACSD’s annual Creek to Bay Cleanup is now open at www.creektobay.org. Out of the 86 cleanup sites around San Diego county, there’s bound to be one near you! Join us on Saturday morning, April 28th to be a steward of the environment and domore with your morning.
Sometimes cleaning up our environment means we have to get a little dirty in the process, but that doesn’t stop our volunteers!
Cupid's Cleanup 2011
Each year around Valentine’s Day, I Love A Clean San Diego organizes the Cupid’s Cleanup as a way for eco-minded singles, couples, and friends to show their love for a clean San Diego by cleaning up an area of our local community. We put on smaller cleanups like Cupid’s each month in communities across San Diego county who have well, gotten a little dirty. We announced last week that in 2011 we mobilized more than 29,000 volunteers who picked up 241 tons of trash from our community’s beaches, waterways, canyons, and parks.
Why get dirty at these cleanups?
Events like Cupid’s cleanup are vital to the health of our local environment and are an important part of preserving the San Diego way of life that we all love so much. Keeping trash out of our ocean not only helps the animals who live there, but also makes it safer for all San Diego residents to swim, surf and play in our coastal waters. If left where it was, that 241 tons of trash would have eventually made it’s way into our waterways and ultimately into the ocean. Who wants to hang out near a big batch of trash soup?
In addition to smaller monthly cleanups, ILACSD coordinates two of the largest countywide cleanup events each year, our signature event the Creek to Bay Cleanup coming up on April 28th, 2012, as well as Coastal Cleanup Day on September 15, 2012. This gives San Diego residents various volunteer options and they see first-hand how trash makes its way from inland communities all the way to the coast through San Diego County’s vast watershed system.
To sign up for Cupid’s Cleanup contact our Community Events Coordinator, Jemma atjdeleon@cleansd.orgor at 619.704.2778 today!
This week was a big one for the environmental community. Monday we celebrated America Recycles Day across the country with a proclamation from President Obama himself. While it was long and a bit dry, there were a few parts that really resonated with us, and reassured us of the importance of our work.
Each small act of conservation, when combined with other innumerable deeds across the country, can have an enormous impact on the health of our environment. On America Recycles Day, we celebrate the individuals, communities, local governments, and businesses that work together to recycle waste and develop innovative ways to manage our resources more sustainably.
Recycling is important, and for some it’s easier than others. When I Love A Clean San Diego made the commitment to serve the community in 1954, recycling was term rarely used. Through phone book recycling drives, Christmas tree recycling programs, electronic waste collection events and our Disposal Solution Center, www.wastefreesd.org, I Love A Clean San Diego has always been first to tackle a recycling challenge.
We were especially happy to hear the report out on Monday from the City of San Diego which announced that the 2010 recycling diversion rate is their highest ever, at 66%. While we don’t want to strain a muscle patting ourselves on the back for this accomplishment, we know that I Love A Clean San Diego’s efforts over the past 56 years may have something to do with this recycling success. But, as a city and a county, there is still room for improvement. Why not shoot for 75% diversion from our landfills? But how?
Good news for those of you living in within the City of San Diego. The City of San Diego also announced on Monday that they will be accepting many more “rigid plastics” in the blue curbside bins. These items include clean plastic food packaging, plant pots, toys, even lawn furniture. The complete press release with all the new rigid plastic rules can be found on the City of San Diego’s website.
And to provide some inspiration for all of us who sometimes struggle with recycling, here’s another excerpt from Obama’s proclamation.
On America Recycles Day, let us respond to our collective responsibility as a people and a Nation to be better stewards of our global environment, and to pass down a planet to future generations that is better than we found it.
That’s right, after a significant hiatus from blogging, I Love A Clean San Diego is back! We have so much to say, and so many events to talk about, restarting the blog was pretty much a no-brainer. Many of our staff members will be contributing to the blog, and if you’d like to be featured as a guest blogger to give a first-hand account of your experiences with ILACSD please contact u.
We look forward to sharing with you and hearing from all of you who have helped shape the environmental movement in San Diego County!
