Tag: CoastSavers

You can join the CoastSavers clean up this weekend and enjoy an outing to Ocean Shores.

Gather up friends and family, walk the shore and lend a hand. The weather looks mild and promising for the annual spring event.

Every April Washington CoastSavers, its partners, and volunteers join forces to clean plastics and debris from the beaches. Governor Jay Inslee has declared Saturday, April 21 as “Washington Coast Cleanup Day.”

Spring is an important time for people to respond to get the plastics and other garbage off the beach and out of circulation.  In winter, debris arrives, getting trapped high on shore, on rocks and in sand.  In summer, the opposite happens and waters tend to move debris offshore.

But no matter where you live or what kind of work you do, marine debris is a human problem.

Marine debris is trash that somehow ends up in the ocean.  It could be a plastic water bottle you threw away several months ago – not at the beach, but at your home.   Maybe it blew out of your garbage, landed in a nearby waterway, and floated out to the coast. Now it’s degrading and poisoning coastal wildlife and releasing its toxins into the food chain.

Or maybe a commercial fishing boat lost some gear during a winter storm. Now it’s floating around out there, damaging coastal fisheries and pointlessly killing everything that gets caught.

The Washington Coast Clean up is part of an International effort to clear debris from the shorelines.

Register in advance and find out more about the beach clean up in Ocean Shores.