Members of the Rotary Club of Tsawwassen, friends of Rotary and students from the Interact Club of South Delta Secondary went to work Saturday helping to clean up a large beach area in Tsawwassen.
The group met up just off the Tsawwassen Ferry Causeway to clean up Tsawwassen Beach as well as the Causeway Beach. They were joined by special guest Alison Wood from Ocean Ambassadors, who has been a recent guest speaker at the club on the topic of shoreline stewardship.
“We had 14 Interactors led by co-president Mateo Mazari who directed the traffic with teams of three or four people who did their best to clean the debris off both beaches,” said Rotarian Rick Lewall. “We had seven Rotarians and two children of one of the Rotarians as well as the Interact teacher liaison Heather Pue. It was fantastic. We were out there for two hours and the weather cooperated too.”
A large mound of garbage was collected including a very large soggy chesterfield cushion, and a rusty frame for a beach chair.
Lewall offered thanks to the City of Delta who supplied garbage bags and garbage pickers.
“The students really did a good job. They organized everyone, got into a lot of the tough areas and really made a great project out of this,” he said. “We are going to be doing a new environmental program called Pickup 3 with the City of Delta, Ocean Ambassadors and Global Container Terminals. Will have more details on this soon, but the idea behind it, is to empower everyone, including students, to pick up three litre items and telling someone else to pick up three and so on, so if we all get into the habit of doing that, we will all have a cleaner environment.”
Grade 10 SDSS student Vanessa Gilmore said she had a great time participating.
“Beach clean ups are important as they increase awareness about pollution and protect local wildlife,” she said. “It was particularly disappointing to see how many bottle caps, cigarette butts and food wrappers we collected. It was very disheartening to find many micro plastics, knowing how damaging they are to innocent wildlife. I am encouraged by Delta’s participation in the Pickup 3 initiative.”
