Beach Clean up with Zero Waste Chicago

Cool things are happening in Chicago, and the creation of Zero Waste Chicago is one of them.

They host monthly events and this month they asked me to lead a beach clean up since I am an Adopt-A-Beach Team Leader. (Check out my other clean up posts here, here, here, and here.)

We headed down to 31st Street Beach, a beach I have not been to or cleaned up before.

For a Tuesday night, it sure was hopping. Families were out barbequing and kids were splashing in the water, trying to squeeze the last few days of summer before back to school.

A great crew of volunteers showed up and spread out all over the beach armed with bags and litter monitoring surveys.

Overall, we collected 35.66 lbs of trash, recycling, and compost!

Some highlights:

• 609 cigarette butts
• 221 food wrappers
• 200 pieces of plastic
• 135 metal bottle caps
• 110 pieces of foam
• 94 pieces of glass
• 69 balloons
• 56 pieces of paper
• 54 plastic bags
• 46 straws
• 18 band-aids
• 7 hair ties
• 1 razor
• 1 tampon
• 1 condom

 

 

Back to the Beach Clean Ups

I willingly spent a Saturday morning picking up garbage.

It has gotten to the point where I will stop my run to pick up a plastic water bottle.

Other people don’t enjoy that as much as I do? Hmm.. weird!

Anyway, we are back to the beach clean up season.

Last Saturday, in honor of World Environment Day, I cleaned up Montrose Beach with members of Delta Institute (I serve on their associate board), Alliance for the Great Lakes, and Goose Island brewery.

 

 

Montrose Beach, Chicago, IL

 

Although it looked pretty clean from far away, in about an hour and a half, our group of three collected:

• 98 cigarette butts
• 40 food wrappers
• 49 foam pieces
• 110 pieces of glass
• 108 small pieces of plastic
• 19 popsicle sticks

In total, our whole group picked up over 290 pounds of trash!!!

 

The whole crew

 

 

Some members of Delta Institute’s associate board, the Delta Emerging Leaders

 

 

Then yesterday, I met up with Alliance for the Great Lakes again and Barefoot Wine to clean up North Avenue Beach to make it barefoot friendly.

 

North Avenue Beach, Chicago, IL

 

It was a beautiful evening so there were still plenty of people hanging out by the water. As opposed to Montrose Beach, there was definitely garbage that you could easily see.

 

Ew.

 

I wouldn’t want to play around in that.

This time our group of three picked up:

• 205 cigarette butts
• 43 food wrappers
• 15 popsicle sticks
• 44 pieces of glass
• A nearly full box of cookies
• 14 total pounds

A lot of the stuff we picked up is small and doesn’t weigh a lot, but once you put all of it together it sure does seem significant.

Beaches Need Love Even When It’s Like 20 Degrees

Last week, Chicago finally got a real taste of winter.

While most people huddled  up inside

Suffering without my gloves for this picture!

and snuggled in blankets (which is what I wanted to do, to be honest), I snuggled up in a bunch of warm layers and rode my bike to North Avenue beach.

 

A while back, I had registered for an Adopt-a-Beach event and once I realized it was going to be on what could have been the first day of snow, I was hesitant.

I  knew I had to go despite the wind and the cold. When I lead an Adopt-a-Beach event in August it was hard enough to get people to come. I didn’t want everyone to back out on a clean up in November!

Luckily we had a pretty good group who braved the elements and the flying sand to pick up cigarettes and bottle caps and endless other weird items.

All in all, we ended up removing 141 pounds of trash! 

 

 

 

#MyBeachIsYourBeach C3 Project

Yesterday was the culmination of my Chicago Conservation Corps training! I finished my project! In partnership with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, I organized an Adopt-A-Beach cleanup event at Oak Street Beach.

While there were some setbacks (such as construction for a volleyball tournament taking up more than half the beach and low volunteer turnout), we still did some good! Armed with gloves, trash bags, and our litter monitoring checklist, we hit the beach.

 

Did not know there would be a volleyball tournament taking up most of the beach! Oops!

 

After collecting trash for over an hour, our bag weighed a whole 10 pounds! You can check out the infographic I put together below for more of a breakdown of what we collected.

If you are in the Great Lakes area, make sure to take part in the world’s largest shoreline cleanup on September 17th to celebrate 25 years of Adopt-A-Beach!