Picking up litter year-round, not just on Earth Day, is an ongoing effort for some. On Saturday, April 12, dozens of student volunteers showed up at Seaplane Promenade Park at Alameda Point to pick up litter and trash from around the lagoon.
“We do these events once a month, every second Saturday,” Patrick Hirsch, a local high school student who is one of the event organizers, told the Alameda Post. Hirsch works with two of the cleanup co-sponsors, Community Action for a Sustainable Alameda (CASA) and Alameda Point business DOER Marine. “We supply the buckets and pickers,” he added.
The other principal organizer and sponsor of the day’s event was youth conservation organization Aquameridian-US. “Today our organization got about 30 signups, and the total turnout was about 50 people, thanks to CASA and DOER and people showing up from friend referrals,” organization leader Felix Lin told the Post. “We had a few elementary schoolers. But our main audience is middle to high schoolers. And then after that we get some corporate employees who want to come out and volunteer.”
With gloves on and a bucket and grabber tool in hand, they fanned out around the Seaplane Lagoon waterfront from the ferry terminal to the future De-Pave Park. Volunteers found themselves carefully maneuvering over shoreline rip rap and a pile of concrete debris in the lagoon to retrieve litter stuck between the boulders and concrete. Others picked up litter along the concrete tarmac and seaplane ramps on the north side of the lagoon and in the vegetation along the shoreline of the future De-Pave Park.
After two hours of work, bottles, plastic wrappers, fishing gear, pieces of wood, Styrofoam, boat hull bumpers, rusty garden chairs, and chunks of plastic among the collection of debris. Seven concrete-filled tires that may once have been part of a dock were rolled back to the staging area and then to the dumpster next to DOER Marine, a block away on Ferry Point Road.
“Aquameridian-US was originally started as a nonprofit to raise awareness about the ocean and its many issues that are often quite local,” Lin told the Alameda Post. “I wanted to find a way to gather more audience. So, I decided to host a beach cleanup here and start expanding that network to where I could start educating people about all these issues, because you can’t really educate if you have no audience.”
When Lin first began organizing shoreline cleanups in 2023, she reached out to the college counselor at her former school, Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, for every beach cleanup so she could forward the flyer to the entire school district. The counselor obliged. “One time we had people from seven different schools signing up,” Lin told the Post.
Lin is familiar with Alameda Point, after serving as an intern at DOER Marine for two years while in high school, at first doing secretarial work. “The second year I got more into the engineering side of things, making 3D models of the submersible vehicle we were working on,” she said. “I was measuring parts and getting into the nitty gritty of the engineering details and also writing the operations manual of the submersible.”
Now a first-year student at UC Berkeley, Lin is studying economics with a minor in data science. “I’m really interested in economics and data analysis due to my past experience with science research,” she said. “I hope that in the future I can get a nice career with that, and then that can hopefully fund my environmental protection passion.”
See more photos from the April 12 cleanup event on the Aquameridian-US website.
The next cleanup event at Seaplane Lagoon is scheduled for May 10, from 10 a.m. to noon.
Contributing writer Richard Bangert posts stories and photos about environmental issues on his blog Alameda Point Environmental Report. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Richard-Bangert.
