Skyline High is situated in the Oakland Hills, but students from the school live throughout Oakland. This distribution of people helped spread the benefits of this month’s at-home litter clean ups performed by Skyline High’s Earth Team. The interns were tasked with picking up litter in their community, and were able to pick up 2,666 pieces of litter throughout the city.
Some students opted to visit one of our many beautiful East Bay Parks for the cleanup, including Dimond Park near Sausal Creek and MLK Shoreline at the mouth of San Leandro Creek. Other students picked up litter in the areas immediately around their homes. No matter where they were, students focused their attention on areas around creeks and storm drains as January rains can wash a lot of litter into bodies of water using either route.
The teams used NOAA’s Marine Debris Tracker App to log the litter they were picking up. The app allows our interns to select what types of litter they are picking up and where they are as well. This data contributes to an international effort to track where our litter ends up in order to better plan for future cleanups and maximize the effectiveness of various litter management strategies.
Having spent a lot of time this year talking about waste, watersheds, and our oceans, it felt good for the team to get out and help solve the problems they have learned about at length. For more info on what Earth Team picked up and where, check our zerolitter.org, Earth Team’s own litter map of the East Bay! Look out for more news about Skyline High’s Earth Team and their efforts to reduce waste in Oakland!