Picking up litter year-round, not just on Earth Day, is an ongoing effort for some. On Saturday, April 12, dozens of students 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,” said Patrick Hirsch, an Alameda high school student and one of the organizers of the event who 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.”
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,” said organization leader Felix Lin. “We had a few elementary schoolers. But our main audience is middle to high schoolers. And then after that we get some corporate employees that 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 from 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 were among the day’s 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.
Federally-owned wetland in the background.
Seaplane Lagoon in background.
“Aquameridian-US was originally started as a non-profit to raise awareness about the ocean and its many issues that are often quite local,” said Lin. “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 high school, Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, every time her organization had a 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,” said Lin.
Lin is familiar with Alameda Point, having served as an intern at DOER Marine for two years while in high school, first doing secretarial work. “The second year I got more into the engineering side of things making 3-D models of the submersible vehicle we were working on,” said Lin. “I was measuring parts and getting into the nitty gritty of the engineering details and also writing the operations manual of the submersible.”
Lin is now a first-year student at UC Berkeley 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,” said Lin. “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, 2025, from 10 a.m. to noon.
Originally published on the Alameda Post.
Alameda Point Environmental Report 