California Coastal Cleanup Day: San Francisco

img_2045On Saturday nine HeadCount San Francisco Team volunteers participated in the 25th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day by picking up litter at one of the state's 800 cleanup locations. We joined the Candlestick Park Cleanup in South San Francisco.

According to the California Coastal Commission:

When combined with the International Coastal Cleanup, organized by The Ocean Conservancy and taking place on the same day, California Coastal Cleanup Day becomes part of one of the largest volunteer events of the year. It has been hailed by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the largest garbage collection" (1993). Since the program started in 1985, over 800,000 Californians have removed more than 13 million pounds of debris from our state's shorelines and coast. In 2008, more than 70,000 volunteers worked together to collect more than 1,600,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from our beaches, lakes, and waterways.

Our cleanup site was coordinated by the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Save The Bay, in partnership with Literacy for Environmental Justice. During the onsite volunteer orientation we learned that the site we were about to clean up, located adjacent to the 49ers' football stadium, was one of the San Francisco area's top ten hot spots. We would be collecting trash for few hours alongside a hundred enthusiastic elementary-school students and parents from the San Francisco Unified School District.

We picked up a large assortment of trash including shoes, cigarette butts, rusty pipes, plastic bags, and tiny bits of styrofoam. Our youngest HeadCount volunteer, 20-month-old Luisito, did a great job helping us pick up bottle caps! Our site was also covered by the San Francisco Chronicle. See more photos after the jump.
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