A River Full of Rubbish!!!

Hello, I’m Brenda Cuellar, a freshman at Cal State Los Angeles, currently enrolled in professor Hernandez’s English 1005B- 82 course and I participated in Friends of the LA River (FOLAR) 28th Annual Great LA River CleanUp on April 22, 2017. While cleaning up the area, it made me visualize all the trash we generate in a day and how much of that trash we just discard without a second thought to the streets. Just like Beavan, I knew that there was no way this will be resolved if everyone filled up at least two bags of trash, there will still be trash tangled in the trees. What I saw the most of was plastic. Some of the plastic were in shreds but they were still holding strong. Blankets were buried in the sand that it seemed impossible to pull them out. Shopping carts were rusted and filled with dirt. I saw someone fishing and by the looks of it, it was highly unlikely he was going to catch anything. The only dead animal I saw was a small crustacean.  I was secretly cursing at everyone that litters, which means most people. Even if we don’t mean to litter, some of our trash will end up in the river. The sad part is, no one realizes their mistake. They don’t take the time to really look under the freeway and notice the harm they do. What I learned from this event was that it will take more than a day to clean that small section. We need to get more people aware the situation before it gets worse. If FOLAR didn’t exist, we would have clogged the river will our trash and destroyed our water system.