Activity and Service: Picking Up Trash on the Beach

Hours: 1

Learning Outcome: Collaboration

My friend Arwen, our moms, and I met up today to go to the beach to pick up some trash. It was pretty windy so our trash bags were blowing a bit, but it wasn't a major issue. We noticed that there were a lot of cigarette butts on the beach. There were also some things, mostly plastic bags that were partially buried deep into the sand so that they were very difficult to pull out and we only got part of them out. We noticed a lot of yellow flowers on the beach that had clearly been placed there on purpose, which was interesting. Another thing we noticed was a lot of gold ribbons connected to signs. Arwen and I did not know what those were for. There were some things that we wondered whether people had left and dug into the sand on purpose for some kind of celebration or religious tradition. I felt kind of bad for throwing a chips container that was recyclable into our bag, but it would be too inconvenient to bring it all the way home to recycle. The trash bag started to get a bit heavy after a while, and some kind of sign thing we dug up was poking a hole in the side, but we managed to get it into the dumpster across the street.