Last week I had the pleasure of leading a group of students from Westside Village Magnet School in Bend here at one of my local parks for a beach cleanup. I first led a cleanup with this school group back in 2009 when I was a young and eager Oregon Field Coordinator for Surfrider Foundation. Today, in my role as Senior Oregon Policy Manager I jump at an opportunity to step away from the computer, wonky policy documents and zoom meetings to get my feet in the sand and directly engage in stewardship. After over 20 years of coastal advocacy from volunteer stewardship efforts on the beach to lobbying some of the most important environmental laws and policies at our state and nation’s Capital, beach cleanups remain one of the most important Surfrider activities I engage in, here's why.
So what’s the big deal with cleanups and why do they outweigh the hundreds of hours I spend each year working on laws and policies to protect the environment? Quite simply policy can prevent pollution, but cleanups remove it. Bang, instant gratification! Trash on the beach doesn’t wait for legislation and frankly after spending a lot of my time struggling with lawmakers and imperfect solutions, it feels good to do something about it.
Like clockwork, just as our legislative sessions are winding down every year Westside Village Magnet School reaches out to our Surfrider Newport Chapter in the late spring for their annual coastal field trip. The timing is perfect as I’m regularly burnt out from the legislative session and need a re-charge so often jump in to lead this group for my local chapter.
After leading cleanups with these Westside teachers and students for nearly 18 years now, we have built strong community and impressed upon thousands of students an ethic of change through stewardship. Those students that participated in the first cleanup we led for Westside back in 2009 are now young adults, likely in their late twenties and early thirties. I wonder how their coastal field trip and these cleanups have stayed with them. They might have kids themselves by now, are old enough to vote and even be a lawmaker themselves. Whether the lasting change of these cleanups lives through their actions today or simply through their participation in that one cleanup years ago, I know those kids made a difference that day I was with them on the beach and it shows with every individual that has returned to enjoy that beach ever since.
Westside Village Magnet students pan out at Ona Beach this past Thursday to collect microplastics in the fine sands around the Beaver Creek mouth.
Looking back at some photos from Westside Village Magnet School cleanups I’m reminded again why I still pick up trash – I’ve spent years helping pass policies that prevent pollution, but no law has ever picked up a single piece of trash from a beach. If that’s not good reason enough, these kids and the generations to follow that can enjoy our beaches certainly are.
Our first Westside cleanup in 2009 focused on cigarette butts as a litter problem, the students removed over 300 cigarette butts in an hour at South Beach State Park and hastily spelled out “No Butts” on the beach. Oregon has yet to ban or change smoking laws on beaches.
Westside cleanup 2010 the students focused on small plastic pieces. They were compelled to send another message and this year were more organized spelling out “No Plastic”. While plastic pollution remains a problem on Oregon’s beaches best solved immediately by cleanups, several statewide policy advancements have begun to attack the problem at it’s source since 2010!
In 2017 we were working on celebrating Oregon’s 50th Anniversary of Oregon’s Beach Bill, the key legislation that made Oregon’s beaches public. Surfrider was working on legislation to better invest in beach protection that year, so the kids all gathered to spell out “Help Beaches” following their cleanup to send a message to lawmakers.
And this last week for the 2026 cleanup, we focused on what items we were finding and where they might have come from. I helped summarize the items and share with the students the importance of data collection and sources to find plastic pollution solutions!