How We Spent Earth Day
We met up with our friends from Surfrider, The EPA and Pyramid Brewing to help clean up the beach at Golden Gardens Park in Ballard and you wouldn’t believe how much trash we collected.
Rough estimates would indicate that we collected well over 500 cigarette butts, hundreds of bottle caps, bread ties, plastic wrappers, one couch cushion a 3 ring binder and thanks to a few adventurous members from the EPA who hiked up the hill leading into golden gardens quite a number of plastic bottles and cans.
Obviously anytime you can clean up trash it is a good thing for the environment, but why the beach? The world produces 8 million metric tons of plastic marine debris each year. To put that in perspective that is more than the combined weight of all Boeing Airliners currently in use worldwide. So the more plastic we can keep off the beach, the less plastic that will enter our oceans.
What can you do to help? Here are Surfriders top seven things you can do to reduce your plastic footprint.
Refuse single-use plastics whenever possible.
Use reusable shopping bags.
Ditch bottled water. Carry a reusable water bottle and refill when available.
Use a travel mug when you order coffee to go.
Avoid plastic utensils.
Attend a beach cleanup.
Recycle.
Want to learn more about what is being done to clean up our oceans? Learn how one kid is cleaning up our oceans in a big way
