ALAMEDA — Colette Ratliff, on her hands and knees, sifted through the Crown Memorial State Beach sand on Saturday, picking up tiny pieces of garbage and placing them into her bag.
“It’s the tiny pieces of plastic that I’m concerned with,” the 54-year-old Oakland resident said. “Animals will eat it.”
Ratliff and her Alameda library colleagues were just some of the 457 volunteers to show up to the 2.5-mile beach Saturday, one of many Coastal Cleanup sites across the state.
Almost 45,000 volunteers statewide collected more than 341,901 pounds of trash and 49,603 pounds of recyclables statewide, according to early reports from the Coastal Commission, with about two-thirds of events reporting. That tonnage equates to about 13.5 school buses scooped up from California’s waterways. Not everything found was disposed of, including a wedding ring found by a volunteer at Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. Juliana Gonzalez, who oversaw Contra Costa’s 32 sites Saturday for The Watershed Project, said a ranger is holding that item in hopes of finding the owner.
In Alameda County, about 4,000 volunteers spanned 8 miles of shoreline to collect 41,575 pounds of trash and 3,297 pounds of recyclables, said Eben Schwartz of the Coastal Commission. In Contra Costa, 900 volunteers collected about 6,500 pounds of trash and 930 pounds of recyclables; Santa Clara County totaled 1,618 volunteers, 44,710 pounds of trash and 2,538 pounds of recyclables; and San Mateo totaled 3,933 volunteers, 22,500 pounds of trash and 2,900 pounds of recyclables.
Kerry Parker, who coordinated the event for the city of Alameda, estimated about 1,000 pounds of refuse was collected, a little under a half of that was recycled or composted.
“If we look down at our feet, it’s filled with tiny bits of plastic and cigarette butts that look like food for birds,” she said. Alameda volunteers Saturday strolled through pickleweed and clumps of red mermaid hair seaweed, picking up big and small pieces of garbage, while pelicans, sea gulls and cormorants watched, bobbing in the water just off shore. Boy Scouts collected with their troops, tweens gabbed and played music on their phones as they plucked bottlecaps off the beach and older volunteers used mechanical pincers to capture trash.
Cherian Zachariah, 44, of Alameda, came with his wife, son and daughter and strolled along the water’s edge.
“We keep talking about the reuse of resources,” Zachariah said. “We can’t keep treating the environment like a trash can. We’ve got to clean it up.”
The family held a bucket and bag full of a beer bottle, cigarette butts, a plastic straw, crochet cross and bottle cap.
Zachariah’s 10-year-old son, Sam, a fifth-grader at Nea Community Learning Center in Alameda, was completing his two-hour community service requirement.
“We’re learning about our community at school, but if we don’t help the community, there’s nothing to learn about,” he said.
In Richmond, Contra Costa Supervisor John Gioia sponsored his 25th straight Coastal Cleanup on the city’s shoreline. Gioia and almost 400 volunteers, largely youth groups, gathered more than 3,000 pounds of garbage from near Shimada Friendship Park. Ten kayakers pitched in off shore.
“This event has really turned into encouraging community environmental stewardship,” Gioia said.
Among the odd items collected in Contra Costa and Alameda counties was a Vietnamese wooden urn (photos of it will be posted on The Watershed Project’s website), a yoga mat, plastic skeleton, buoy and sex toy.
Back on the Alameda beach, Dolores Murillo, 36, of Concord, volunteered with about two dozen Wells Fargo co-workers and her 3-year-old daughter, Tamiry Foster.
“We want to help clean up the beach. We love the ocean and we’re here all the time so we might as well help clean it up,” Murillo said, with her checklist cataloging 32 cigarette butts and a number of fast food dipping sauce containers.
Tamiry, after an hour cleaning the beach, had transitioned her clean-up bucket: “I’m making a castle,” she told her mom as she poured handfuls of clean sand into the container.
Contact Matthias Gafni at 925-952-5026. Follow him at Twitter.com/mgafni.