It is Spring and it is Earth Day! Today was Shin Shin Youth Earth Day Clean-up Event! To commemorate Earth Day, a group of our Shin Shin Youth volunteered to join the clean-up event to remove trash along the San Francisco Bay at Coyote Point, a regional recreation area that provides a wide variety of activities: picnicking, swimming, windsurfing, bicycling, jogging, fishing, boating, and sailing, on Saturday, April 20th, 2019.
I woke up early on Saturday morning, grabbed my breakfast and a picker arm, and rushed out with my father to meet the other youth at Coyote Point. After about 30 mins driving, we finally met the six other Shinshin Youth and their parents. Everyone was excited to start the job. The trash pickup organizer, San Mateo County Parks Department, provided each of us with a 5-gallon bucket for collecting. We started walking around to look for trash. At first, we ventured inland but there wasn’t much trash, so we decided to go down to the actual beach to search for trash. Smelling salty, the area was already relatively clean, so my dad and I decided to have a little adventure. We proceeded further around a group of large rocks which split us from the group. The ground was really slippery with a fierce wind blowing. We managed to pick up a lot of shattered glass along this edge of the beach. As the glass was mostly all picked up, we walked all the way back to where we started, and reunited with other youth. Together, we filled up a whole bucket with shattered glass and random pieces of plastic. Looking around, the beach seemed much more natural, and I’m proud of helping protect marine life from harmful trash. What a great job to protect our environment! - David Ke |
Shin Shin Youth Group participated in the Coyote Point Earth Day Clean-up Volunteer event this year on April 20. This was a great opportunity to help protect our coastal environment during the annual Earth Day event.
Coyote Point Park is next to the San Francisco Bay. Broken glasses, bottles, plastics, recyclables, etc can easily get into the water and endanger birds and marine life. Shin Shin Youth Group members arrived at Coyote Point Park early in the morning and started collecting loose trash in the park. The park was actually pretty clean as it was just swept the day before. So we went down to the beach, and found an area with lots of broken glasses. Someone even found a deserted skateboard there. The broken glasses were mostly from beer bottles. The shards were tiny, and some were hidden underneath pebbles. At high tide, the broken glasses can be easily washed off shore into the ocean. Shin Shin Youth volunteers spent about two hours collecting the broken glass and some plastic bottles. We are really proud that we helped to keep this beautiful beach looking great. - Alice Feng |