I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into when I forced myself out of bed at eight am on Saturday, October 20th to head to Atlantic City for a beach sweep. A few of my friends had asked me to give the club WaterWatch a chance and I was curious to attend my first event with the group. The beach sweep I participated in was organized on campus by WaterWatch in collaboration with the off campus group, COA, Clean Ocean Action.
Once the group of Stockton volunteers arrived on the boardwalk and the event was introduced, pencils, trash bags, and gloves were in everyone’s hands within minutes. Soon we were advancing on the beach as a small trash collecting army. I was given the job of recorder in my group. As I tried to check off all the items, I became quite overwhelmed. The paper was full of little spaces for everything you could imagine throwing away from plastic bottle caps to rubber bands. I quickly tallied everything as my group members combed the beach. It was evident early on that Atlantic City’s beach was filthy. Within the first five minutes, we had already counted over a hundred cigarette butts. I watched in horror as my group members repeatedly dug into the ground and came up with handfuls of junk.
I was even more disgusted at what we were finding as we moved to beneath the pier. I had never seen so much illicit paraphernalia lying blatantly in the sand. As I watched my group scoop up the items and dispose of them, I thought of the innocent children who discarded the broken toys we had collected beforehand. Had they discovered the same illicit items? I thought of how ugly and uninviting the beach became because of the trash as I scanned the ground for garbage. It spoiled the natural beauty of taking a trip to the shore.
I took a break under the pier as we switched trash bags and gazed at the waves breaking. The morning sunlight peered into the darkness between the columns and caught a bit of beauty I did not see when I was focused on the garbage littering the beach. The image of the tide coming in under the pier was a beautiful reminder to what the beach had been and still could be. As I stood concentrating on the scene, I was reminded of why so many people had gotten themselves out of bed early on a Saturday to pick up gross items on the beach. The beach was being destroyed and we had to help it come back to that serene beauty it naturally had. Nature could not fight our liter that was not decomposable, but we could.
The beach sweep turned into an enlightening experience of environmental awareness. I had no idea until I got hands on with the clean up how bad the beach in Atlantic City was. I figured I would find some trash, but I did not expect what I did find, such as the hundreds of cigarette butts washed up on the shore in tidelines. The beach sweep was able to educate me on how bad the littering situation is on the Atlantic City beach. It is evident from participating in the event that there is a ton of harmful waste just left on beaches that needs to be taken care of.
My group squirmed together but after walking away from a clean pier, a sense of success made leaving our comfort zone to pick up the illicit trash worth it. At the end of the day, trash bags lined the boardwalk trapping in the harmful things to the beach environment. The beach sweep was a well organized, enlightening experience that I enjoyed. I will definitely be at the next WaterWatch Beach Sweep no matter how illicit and gross the trash is that I will have to pick up. The environment needs to be protected and just a day of combing the beach for trash can make a difference.