We love our beaches here in the city, but let’s be honest, they don’t always have a reputation as being the cleanest places to romp in the sun. You can help do something about the occassional mess though, and you don’t even have to get your hands dirty: per the Brooklyn Daily, the city is looking for volunteers to record beach garbage every week. We’ll start! This past weekend, we saw an abandoned baby diaper at Jacob Riis.
The program the city is looking to fill with people is called the Volunteer Beach Floatables Program, and involves people walking the beach for 20 minutes every week and recording the garbage they see floating in the water. The Department of Environmental Protection told the paper that you’ll be on the front line of helping figure out which beaches need the be targeted for cleaning, by wandering the shore and checking off whatever gross things you see floating in the water that might wash up on the shore.
Don’t worry though, the not getting your hands dirty thing above was literal, because all you’re doing is recording the trash you see, not picking it up. According to the Brooklyn Daily, the most pressing need for volunteers is in Gowanus, Coney Island and Manhattan Beach, but they’ll also welcome volunteers on any beach people want to go to. If you want to be a hero of the beach and one day be welcomed to a sand-filled Valhalla, shoot an email to program manager Robert Gans at ozonelayerllc [AT] me.com for more info.
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