The Next Generation

Sea Stars

February 15, 2015 Comments (0) journal

A Valentine for Yowkwala

The South Sound chapter of the Surfrider Foundation did its monthly beach cleanup yesterday. We went back out to Yowkwala Beach in northeast Tacoma and spent a couple of hours picking up the garbage and debris that had accumulated since the last cleanup. (The chapter had been out there a few months ago and picked up over a hundred pounds of trash and another cleanup, organized by Citizens for a Healthy Bay, took another large pile of garbage off the beach just a month ago.

Lots of plastic bottles and filmed plastic, but the biggest problem is the styrofoam… everyone worked hard to get what they could, but the individual pieces get so small that they literally become part of the beach. Larger chunks can be picked up fairly easily; the tiny individual nuggets are virtually impossible to recover. It’s one of Tacoma’s least-visited beaches, and one of its most beautiful. A day here in the sun with a trash bag in one hand and a camera in the other is well worth the effort.