Just after Valentine’s Day, on Saturday, February 15th, Earth Team interns from both Antioch High School and Pittsburg High School showed some love to the Antioch Marina by conducting a cleanup event. Stationed in a nice park along the waterfront, this cleanup sought to engage our interns in the process of keeping their local watershed free of debris and litter.
The Antioch Marina park consists of one main cement pathway leading out from a large parking lot along the perimeter of the harbor towards a dead end that hits open land space and the San Joaquin River. The park is nicely kept with benches and a small play structure surrounded by sheltering lawns, hedges, and trees. The park area even hosts a number of both trash and recycling bins obviously meant to deter people from littering.
However, despite these bins installed along the pathway, interns found a variety of litter throughout the park, including food wrappers, plastic and glass bottles, styrofoam containers, single-use plastic bags, sports balls, and cigarette butts. Four freshman interns from the Antioch team even found an abandoned space heater, which was completely waterlogged from being dumped under the harbor walkway.
In order to rid this shared community space of trash, interns geared up with gloves and grabbers, and they used trash bags to collect any physical pollution they could see. After about an hour of cleaning up, the park grounds looked pretty much spotless, allowing some groups to expand their trash collection boundaries to include the parking lot. Then, with almost 45 minutes left in the event, interns spent the rest of the time sorting the litter they collected on a large tarp.
The waste was divided into two main groups: trash and recycling. Separating the litter into these groups helped Earth Team properly dispose of what was collected, placing trash and recycling in their respective bins present on-site. A third group of sorted litter was created to accommodate a few items of electronic waste, which the Program Coordinator who was running the event brought back to Earth Team’s office to dispose of properly.
Overall, the event was a great success! For Earth Team’s interns at Antioch and Pittsburg High Schools, this cleanup is just the precursor to many exciting environmental service and team-building events planned for the upcoming spring season.
