If you want to help keep New York City’s beaches clean and have 20 minutes a week to spare, you can volunteer to be part of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Volunteer Floatables Beach Surveillance program and be on the frontline of identifying beaches that need to be cleaned. Volunteers walk the beach and count pieces of floating trash, such as Styrofoam containers, that have washed up on the beach.
Brooklyn Daily reports:
The program arms the trash monitors with a checklist that includes a dizzying variety of flotsam, such as bottles, diapers, and tires, but also light sticks, crack vials, syringes, and condoms. But Gans is quick to point out that program volunteers are just reporting the presence of garbage, not picking up the trash themselves. The city organizes beach clean-ups based on the data collected by the floatables surveillance program.
No one wants to go to a beach covered in syringes and dirty diapers, so this is noble work. If you want to get involved, email ozonellayerllc@me.com.
(Photo: Jay Gorman)
