Human Impact on Cabrillo Beach

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Each year, hundreds of thousands of people come together to pick up garbage from beaches and waterways. This annual event is called the International Coastal Cleanup. After each cleanup, specific information about the trash collected, is compiled and published. The Ocean Conservancy project puts out data from their Data Report, “CleanSwell 2018 Report” each year that shows categorized specifics to help people be educated on types of Marine Debris found at the beach. However, in an estimated 3 hours of picking up and collecting trash, the beaches should be cleaned, since the California Coastal Clean Up is from 9 to 12, according to the California Coastal Commission, who designates the hours. Our main goal is to go to Cabrillo Beach, which is the “9th most polluted beach in California” according to the 2018 Beach Report Card Southern California Release, (King and Wu, 2018, p.2 ) to note the litter patterns and compare it to the data found on the previous beach clean-up that took place on September 15th 2018. We plan to map the inner and outer parts of the beach and count the trash present. We will also categorize and quantify the data found and compare it to the Coastal Cleanup 2018 report, which states, “cigarette butts and food wrappers” were the top 2 pieces of litter in the United States. (Ocean Conservancy 2018 Report, Merran, 2018, p.19) The purpose of this is to test if trash is one of the most widespread pollutants on the beach. How much plastic is found at the beach and what types of plastic are they? With this information we can help organize more beach clean ups and show people how harmful certain types of trash can be to the oceans, specifically plastic.