Beach Cleanup
On monday morning at 7:30 am I took part in a beach clean up on Coco Beach between 42nd and 88th streets. I heard about this because from posters in the Municipal Palace. I have felt like I wanted to do something like this for a while, Playa Del Carmen and Mexico have given me so much in my life. I convinced my friend Hans to go with me, because I had a feeling I might be the only gringo there. I was right.
Hans picking up garbage
We met at Coco Beach resort, by 7:45 there were not that many people there, mostly people that worked for various departments of city government. They got the morning off to do this, I never asked if they had a choice. After waiting five more minutes about 10 people from Sam’s and 10 people from Walmart, all wearing their uniforms, showed up. Next a group of kids from UNID, one of the local colleges, wandered down.
Walmart Employees Resting
It was explained that we would have to separate the garbage into four different groups: Cans, Plastics, Garbage, and Bottles. We had different bags for different stuff and were asked to count different items, especially cigarette butts.
Hans is still learning spanish, sometimes he forgets the words, so during the cleanup he asked me a couple of times what the word for this-or-that was, but he did pretty well dealing with the language thing.
We separated into groups and some people had bags and some got gloves, we started to wander down the beach. We walked and picked up garbage, people calling for different bags for different things, people shouting out “Colilla” when they found a cigarette butt.
Beach Cleaning Machine
The beach passed very quickly and what seemed like no time at all we had arrived at the 88th Street lifeguard station, this was our goal and we had accomplished it. As we rested in the shade we watched as a mechanized beach cleaner passed down the beach where we had just finished picking up, I didn’t ask what that was about. I spend quite a bit of time on this section of beach and have never seen the machine here before.
It was really pretty ok walking down the beach looking at the ocean and picking up garbage, I can’t think of any other place I would rather do community service. I am thinking about going to the city’s environmental department to see if I can get on some sort of mailing list for more of these events.
i saw this the other day too – same day as the giant condom! jaja! i was down on the beach by shangri-la and this ginormous thing drove by. i figured out what it was, but found it interesting that it only cleaned this one continuous strip of beach. i was wondering if it would come back, cleaning another strip, but it never came. so . . . at least there’s a strip of beach that i assume gets cleaned on a regular basis!
Great work.