Celebrate the beginning of a new month with ILACSD and the Ramona Parks and Recreation Association on Saturday, October 7th from 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM for the Restore Ramona Cleanup! Volunteers will meet at Ramona Community Park, 913 Elm St. San Diego, CA 92065 for a chance to treat the community this October!
We encourage volunteers to bring their own reusable items such as – water bottles, work gloves, and buckets to promote zero waste practices and help us in our mission to have a zero waste, litter free and environmentally engaged San Diego region!
All volunteers are required to fill out a waiver form to participate and anyone under the age of 18 needs a parent or guardian signature.
Can you believe it’s already September? In the ILACSD office, that means we’re in full swing for Coastal Cleanup Day! It seems unreal that it is less than two weeks away. As we amp up for this huge day of action for our environment, we wanted to take some time to show some love to our cleanup sites that are still in need of more volunteers! Volunteers are encouraged to register at a cleanup site in need today at CleanupDay.org!
Stop inland trash and debris from making it out to the beach this Coastal Cleanup Day!
While the beach locations are a big hit for Coastal Cleanup Day, it is still vitally important to spread out our efforts throughout the county. San Diego County has 11 different watersheds that carry debris out to the coast and ocean. This year, we want to encourage volunteers to explore a newer area also! Stop debris from even reaching the beach where it is more likely to end up in the ocean and affect the wildlife.
With over 100 cleanup and beautification sites throughout San Diego County, Coastal Cleanup Day offers this unique opportunity to explore new areas in your own town! Volunteers can find a new area for hiking or a neighborhood park they never knew about before. Check out some of the sites listed below to find a new site you’d be interested in volunteering at on Coastal Cleanup Day. Who knows, maybe you’ll find your new favorite hidden gem in San Diego!
Click any of the sites listed below to take you directly to the registration page for that location. If you have any questions about these sites or Coastal Cleanup Day in general, feel free to reach out to our Community Programs Coordinator, Michelle Freeman.
Central San Diego:
Alpine Creek before volunteers cleaned it up last year on Coastal Cleanup Day.
Did you know that the Tijuana River Valley is home to two dozen sensitive species and 340 bird species? With 1,800 acres of diverse habitat, it is a special sight to see! Help us remove trash and harmful waste from this unique and sensitive habitat and prevent trash from reaching the ocean shores!
Join ILACSD and WiLDCOAST on Saturday, September 30th from 9:00 AM – 12:0 0 PM for our Tijuana River Valley Cleanup!
Last year we removed over 6,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from the river valley! Come with us this year for this truly rewarding experience! Help us practice and promote zero-waste practices by bringing your own reusable supplies like buckets, gloves, and water bottles, though we will have extras on hand too!
All volunteers are required to sign a waiver, of which volunteers under the age of 18 will need an additional parent/guardian signature.
Volunteers will meet at Dairy Mart Road Bridge near 2411 Dairy Mart Road, San Diego, CA 92154.
I Love A Clean San Diego and the City of Chula Vista are excited for this year’s Beautify Chula Vista Day! Join us on Saturday, October 21st from 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM and help us celebrate Beautify Chula Vista Day’s 15th year by giving back to the Chula Vista community with a cleanup and several projects! This event as a whole has made an extensive impact on the City of Chula Vista and will continue on its path to make a difference for the years to come! It is truly amazing the results that can come from one morning with hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers!
This year, volunteers can meet us at one of the following two locations: Rice Canyon at Discovery Park (700 Buena Vista Way, Chula Vista, CA 91910) or Otay Rec Center (3554 Main St, Chula Vista, CA 91911)! Volunteers will pick up trash, remove graffiti, and complete other projects that make Chula Vista shine. More information about the event can be found at www.BeautifyChulaVista.org.
Waiver forms are available online or at the cleanup site. All volunteers are required to fill out a waiver form to participate, and anyone under the age of 18 needs a parent or guardian signature. Signed forms will be made available to volunteers who need verification of service hours. We will have all supplies needed at the cleanup site, but we encourage volunteers to bring their own reusable items (water bottles, work gloves, and buckets) if they have them to promote zero waste practices!
Registration officially is open for San Diego County’s Coastal Cleanup Day! While the name Coastal Cleanup Day suggests that this cleanup is all about the beach, many of you already know ILACSD’s volunteer efforts reach far beyond the coast. With eighty percent of marine debris originating in inland areas, at ILACSD we have expanded our Coastal Cleanup Day reach to include both inland and coastal territory. This year, sixty-five percent of the cleanup sites are located inland along rivers, creeks, canyons, and urban areas with the aim to stop debris before it makes its way to the ocean. We even have 3 clean ups happening on the water with kayaks! With 114 cleanup sites last year, volunteers removed 185,000 pounds of debris from San Diego County – the equivalent weight of 10 garbage trucks! Help us remove even more trash and debris and beautify our county by getting registered for this year’s Coastal Cleanup Day on September 16, 2017, from 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM! Get registered now at www.CleanupDay.org!
Cut back on waste by bringing your own reusable buckets, work gloves, and water bottle if you have them!
In an effort to reduce waste produced by an event of this size, Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers can pledge to bring at least one reusable item to the cleanup. When volunteers bring their own reusable water bottle, work gloves, and bucket to collect litter, they prevent thousands of single-use bags and disposable gloves from entering San Diego’s landfills. When you register, please consider pledging to bring one of these items with you (or all three)! Once again, we will be having our “Bling Your Bucket” competition for Coastal Cleanup Day. Participants have the opportunity to decorate their reusable buckets showing off their creativity and imagination and submit photos for the chance to win fun prizes and have their picture posted on the Coastal Cleanup Day website for one year! Volunteers of all ages are also encouraged to participate!
Participate in the Sony Photo Contest for the chance to win a Point & Shoot Camera!
The Sony Photo Contest is also returning to Coastal Cleanup Day! While you spend the morning helping to preserve our environment, snap some pictures of all of your hard work! After attending Coastal Cleanup Day, participants can submit their best photo from the event into the competition where the top five finalists will be put to a vote on the ILACSD Facebook page. The winner will receive a Sony Point and Shoot Camera!
We also collect valuable data about the debris collection that helps us understand how we can better prevent litter. Instead of using paper data cards, ILACSD is asking volunteers to download the Ocean Conservancy’s user-friendly mobile data collection app, Clean Swell, onto their smartphones as another way to cut back on waste.
Bring the whole family and join us for Coastal Cleanup Day on September 16th!
Not only will we be removing litter on Coastal Cleanup Day, the event also includes beautification projects such as graffiti removal and replacement of invasive species with drought-tolerant alternatives. Volunteers who signup will work with ILACSD to preserve and enhance San Diego for current and future generations to enjoy. Leading the way to a zero waste, litter-free, and environmentally engaged San Diego region, ILACSD encourages all community members to take action in their neighborhood by joining us on September 16th. Registration information and details regarding Coastal Cleanup Day can be found at www.CleanupDay.org.
Happy World Ocean’s Day! Today we celebrate the ocean for the joy it brings us, the food it provides us, and the oxygen it supplies us. The mysterious and vast ocean with its other-worldly creatures captivates young and old alike. From nudibranchs and sea hares to sharks and rays, the ocean holds amazingly unique creatures. Unfortunately, many are threatened by human actions that negatively impact their habitats. Therefore, today must also be a call to action to protect these organisms and preserve our ocean!
Ocean acidification threatens ocean ecosystems that include oysters, reefs, and the foundation of several food chains, plankton.
Ocean acidification is one way in which humans are driving drastic changes in the ocean. Ocean acidification is the alteration of ocean chemistry as a result of increased carbon absorption, which is a direct effect of increased carbon emissions. One serious consequence of ocean acidification is that it becomes very difficult for certain organisms, such as corals, oysters, and even plankton, to both build and maintain the calcium carbonate structure that they depend upon, such as shells and reefs. This can negatively impact the organism itself, as well as entire ocean ecosystems.
Coral and sea urchins are also affected by ocean acidification.
Thankfully, we can control how much carbon we each emit into the atmosphere. Follow these four easy steps to reduce your carbon emissions.
Travel by foot, bike or trolley more often to reduce your carbon footprint!
Environmental Education Specialist, Grace enjoying one of San Diego’s many bike trails.
Spend less time in your car. This could mean riding your bike, walking, taking public transportation, or carpooling. The average car produces about 19.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon. Reducing your need to fuel up helps to lessen your impact on the environment and your wallet all at once.
Lower your electricity bill. This doesn’t just mean turning off lights, but can include simple and easy practices such as unplugging appliances when they aren’t in use, utilizing energy saving light bulbs, and enabling the sleep function on your computer.
Buy local. Products have less distance to travel when you choose to buy locally made and grown products, reducing the amount of energy used to transport the goods.
Practice the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Go even one step further and purchase items made out of recycled material. Less energy will go towards manufacturing new products and finding natural resources to make them. Don’t know where to recycle something? Check out WasteFreeSD.org.
Looking for more tips? Come to our Zero Waste Summit this Saturday, June 11th in Encinitas to build your zero waste toolkit with great giveaways! The whole family is welcome to come out, tour our interactive booths, and hear from a panel of zero waste experts. With your effort, we can keep our oceans healthy and accessible well into the future. Enjoy World Ocean Day!
ILACSD, Solana Center and Jimbo’s will all have interactive booths this Saturday!
Here at I Love A Clean San Diego, we like to make it as easy as possible for people to volunteer with us. That’s why we love our Adopt-A-Beach and Adopt-A-Canyon programs—people can schedule beach or canyon cleanups any day of the year, and we provide all of the cleanup supplies for free.
Thanks to a grant from the Escondido Charitable Foundation, we are now able to bring this program to two sites in Escondido—Dixon Lake and Kit Carson Park. These are the first adoptable sites in inland North County, and we’re thrilled to have this program as an option for people who live far from the nearest adoptable beach.
This past weekend, we hosted a kickoff event to officially launch the program. We invited volunteers to join us at Dixon Lake in northeastern Escondido.
And we sure did kick off this program with a bang! A grand total of 402 volunteers collected 348 pounds of trash and recycling from around the lake and nearby Daley Ranch hiking trails. Here’s a recap of how the event unfolded.
Our volunteers listen attentively to the kickoff and safety talk from Lexi, our Development Manager. She covered topics like how trash travels through the community, why cleanups are important, and local recycling rules. She also talked about how to get involved with the newly launched Adopt-A-Canyon program in Escondido. Some of these volunteers have already signed up online and scheduled their next Escondido cleanups!
A team from the Division 37 East Key Club paused for a photo in front of scenic Dixon Lake. Throughout the morning, lake visitors thanked our volunteers for helping to keep the park clean and litter-free!
Miles of trails run along the lake, so our volunteers were able to spread out and cover a lot of ground. Here, a team from North Coast Church walked along one of the lake trails hunting for litter with our trash grabber and bucket in hand!
You never know what you’ll find at our cleanup events! This young volunteer wins our Most Unusual Item prize for finding this full bottle of sparkling cider. Here’s to you!
We weigh all of the trash and recycling collected at our cleanups as a way of measuring our impact and accomplishments. When volunteers use their own buckets instead of single-use plastic bags, we simply subtract the weight of the empty bucket to determine the weight of the trash. The buckets get emptied right into the dumpster—no single-use plastics needed!
A big thanks to this massive volunteer team from UCSD’s Upward Bound program. We love working with big groups like this one to get a lot accomplished at our events. These young students were a huge help!
Interested in adopting one of these sites? Visit www.AdoptSD.org to learn more and to schedule your own cleanups. We can provide a free educational presentation to kick off your first cleanup, and if you complete three cleanups over the course of a year, you can apply to have your group’s name posted on a sign on site.
We’ll be back at Dixon Lake, as well as at four other Escondido sites, for our big countywide event, the Creek to Bay Cleanup, on Saturday, April 23rd from 9AM-12PM. Registration opens April 1st at CreektoBay.org!
Today’s blog is from our Education Specialist, Grace! Grace is apart of ILACSD’s team of educators which leads thousands of students and adults each year in hands-on activities that showcase how our choices impact the environment around us. Read on for highlights from one of our favorite presentations from last year!
First, a little background.
Plastic has been integrated into almost every facet of our daily lives, from plastic water bottles and grocery bags to polyester clothing and packaged food. It has become so incorporated into our society that often times it is hard to perform routine tasks without the use of plastic. Subsequently, a lot of plastic makes its way into our environment, travels through our waterways, and often finds its way into the ocean. One of the most notable areas where this garbage collects is the Pacific Garbage Patch.
Various animals are impacted by plastics in the environment, through entanglement and ingestion. One animal in particular that has been severely harmed by this trash is the albatross, a seabird that frequents the Pacific Garbage Patch. Through this ingestion of plastics and other trash, many of these birds become malnourished and starve.
How can we make a difference?
Grace engaging a group of students in a discussion about what they found during the bolus dissection.
In conjunction with our educational programs, students at High Tech High Chula Vista were given the opportunity to witness this tragedy first hand through their dissection of an albatross bolus. Much like an owl pellet, these birds naturally regurgitate indigestible items including squid beaks, and volcanic rocks that help with their digestion, all components of a typical bolus. However, as the students discovered, today’s boluses tell a different story. Students removed fishing line, bottle caps, plastic and foam bits, and polyester fibers from boluses, highlighting the level of impact that we are having on the albatross and other marine organisms. Plastic has become so ubiquitous in the environment and the lives of these albatross that of the 10 boluses the students dissected, 100% of them contained some degree of plastic fragments.
100% of the boluses that the students dissected contained plastic.
Although many would feel discouraged by these findings, the students at High Tech High Chula Vista felt further empowered to continue their journey toward having a more positive impact on their environment. If you’re looking for simple ways to start reducing your personal plastic usage, consider refusing single-use straws, investing in reusable sandwich bags, and committing to remember your reusable grocery bags. Get started on the right foot by attending I Love A Clean San Diego’s free Zero Waste Home workshop happening this Saturday, January 9th!
Learn the basics of living a zero waste lifestyle at our next free workshop happening this Saturday, Jan. 9!
Also, keep an eye out for our upcoming blog about the students’ 70 Day Shake-up project and how they integrated creative environmentally friendly habits into their everyday lives!
On Saturday, December 5, I Love A Clean San Diego closed out its 2015 cleanups with a volunteer project and guided nature walk at Black Mountain Ranch Open Space in the 4S Ranch neighborhood. More than 200 volunteers from the community came out to beautify this natural area, which had been badly damaged by wildfires in 2014.
In just 3 hours, volunteers filled a 40-yard dumpster with things like furniture, exercise equipment, and metal drums—all while learning about the native and non-native plants that grow right in their backyards. Check out these photos from the event.
Safety first! Our team kicked off the event with a presentation on how trash can travel from this neighborhood out to the coast, local recycling rules, and safety reminders for the cleanup.
This girl scout knows the importance of picking up small pieces of litter, which animals often mistake for food.
Our Executive Director, Pauline Martinson, and long-serving board member, Bill Haines, joined forces with our volunteers to beautify the area.
Our Education Manager, Emily Nelson, and Clean Committee member, Andrew Heath, led a group on a nature walk of the area. The volunteers used field guides to help them identify native and non-native plants. They saw a coyote, too!
Farther down the trail, some young volunteers helped load bulky items into our truck, which we used to shuttle trash to the dumpster.
Tiny trash is important to pick up, but of course the big stuff matters, too! A team effort helped pull this old fridge out of the ravine.
Two of our board members, Vince Reardon and Michael Page, got their hands dirty alongside our Program Assistant, Vince Rivas, and volunteer Stan Nelson. This is their last haul of debris before calling it quits for the day.
Special thanks to the 4S Ranch-Del Sur Community Foundation for providing the funding to host this project and educate the community about caring for our environment!
Visit CleanSD.org for more information about upcoming 2016 events!
