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News and Media

News and Media

By Founder and President Kurt Lieber

The winter storms have dumped some much-needed rain on beautiful southern California!  Unfortunately, the rains have washed tons and tons of plastic debris into our drainage canals and rivers.

And as you know this means our beaches and harbors have been inundated with the all the plastics and other human waste. 

This morning, I read an article in the Orange County Register about how Seal Beach has been affected, so I grabbed my camera, trash pickers, some garbage bags, gloves…and headed to the beach to see what I could see.

As soon as I got to the shoreline, I could see thousands of pieces of plastics scattered from the water’s edge to some sand mounds that the city had created in order to stop the ocean from flooding the waterfront homes.

Trashed beach

As I was walking around, I saw some young ladies with plastic bags in their hands. Wow!  They had gloves on and were picking up pieces of the plastics with their hands.  I introduced myself, told them about Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA), and asked if I could join in the beach-cleaning fun. 

I grabbed all the stuff I had left in the car, handed them some trash pickers, and off we went for the next hour.  We didn’t have to move far at all, there was so much stuff that each one of us filled our bags in short order.  We had about 100 pounds in total.  Nice haul for such a short time.

It was getting late, and the sun was setting, so I took a few pictures. 

Helpful young ladies

Then we said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways.

This beach needs our help.  If you want to join in, it’d be great to have your help. Let’s meet up at Seal Beach this Saturday, 9 AM.

Let me know if you can make it, so I know how much gear to bring with me. Please email volunteer@oceandefenders.org.

We need all the feet in the sand that we can gather.  Let’s get this trash BEFORE it gets blown out to sea and into the abyss that is the Pacific Garbage Patch!

Styrofoam trash