Bigger goal in a search for garbage
Kids take to the hunt during yearly Adopt-a-Beach effort
It’s no fun picking up trash, unless you’re trying to save the world.
That was the order of business Wednesday at Ocean Beach as scores of elementary school students got on their hands and knees, seeking to do right by one of the world’s great sandboxes.
“Cigarette butt,” said Michael Lipsitz, 9, a thirdgrader from Willow Creek School in Sausalito, holding up what he found and inspecting it as if it were the Koh-i-Noor diamond. “If a bird ate this, it wouldn’t be good.”
And, Michael added, if a bird tried to smoke the cigarette butt, that wouldn’t be good, either.
It was the 25th annual Adopt-a-Beach cleanup day, organized by the Marine Science Institute, and as in past years, the San Francisco beach adopted was the one that grown-ups also like to adopt for
picnicking, barbecuing, beer swilling and other things that involve refuse that doesn’t always find its way into trash bins.
The kids weren’t looking for big pieces of trash, like whole bottles, but little pieces of trash: bottle caps, bits of plastic, filter tips, shards and wrappers. They’d been told that, to a hungry bird or fish, the small pieces can be more dangerous than the big ones.
Fifi Salem, 9, found a bottle cap that said “Stella Artois” on it. She said she didn’t know what that might be, but a bottle cap is a bottle cap. Into her bag it went.
Max Nimmo found 121 bits of trash in the first half-hour. Under the terms of the deal with the grown-ups in charge, for each 50 pieces he collected, he earned one Starburst candy. That meant, he said, that he had 29 more bits of trash to go for his next Starburst.
“Got another one,” said Max, picking up trash piece No. 122, a fragment of a soda bottle.
Michael found a fake mustache. His friend Alayah Palomares, 9, digging a few feet away, also found a fake mustache. There must have been a costume party or something not long ago at that very spot. Grown-ups are hard to figure out. “Weird,” Alayah said. After an hour or so, the kids were still hard at it. This was not, they decided, like picking up trash on the schoolyard after goofing off. At such times, you don’t get to wear plastic gloves, you don’t get Starbursts, you don’t feel all that great about doing it.
Most days, said Gaia McArdle, 10, picking up trash is what the teacher makes you do instead of asks you to do.
“Usually, it’s punishment,” she said. “Not today. Picking up trash today is fun.”