Cleaning Dockweiler Beach

Hello my name is Kevin Sakamoto. My classmates, from English 101 at CSULA, and I participated in a beach cleaning event called Heal the Bay at Dockweiler Beach. I had never done anything like this before so I was interested to see what it would be like. When my classmates and I were told that this was one of the cleanest beaches I was hopeful that I wouldn’t have to pick up very much trash, but when we got there I realized that even one of the cleanest beaches is pretty dirty. It made me wonder what the dirtiest beaches looked like. My classmates and I helped clean the beach from 9-12 Sunday morning and managed to fill several bags full of trash. While cleaning the beach I realized the number one thing we found was cigarette butts. It was unbelievable how many we found. We also found a lot of plastic and Styrofoam pieces. The worst thing is that all these little pieces of trash are mistaken as food by the wild life and are hazardous to their health. We even found a knife and a car sunroof. There were many other weird thing found that should not be on a beach. All this made me realize how filthy people can be by not throwing away their trash. Next time I got to the beach I will be sure to throw all my trash away to help prevent harm to the environment. Cleaning the beach was a fun experience and opened my eyes to how little things can help out the environment.