By Enrique Rodriguez
May 2, 2024
COSTA MESA– The Orange County Coastkeeper’s focus is to make sure that the environment in Orange County like beaches, flood channels and other locations are clean and spotless, with no trash being seen left on the ground.
The Orange County Coastkeeper is a clean water organization that looks after fresh and saltwater ecosystems and makes sure that it does not get dirty and that trash does not become an issue.
According to the Orange County Coastkeeper, Garry Brown founded the organization in 1999 at Newport Beach. With only two employees, the Orange County Coastkeeper began business on March 1999.
25 years later, thousands of people volunteered to help out the organization and pick up trash to help keep the environment clean and safe.
The organization picked up and threw away over 165,000 pounds of trash since 2011, including over 17,000 pounds of trash in 2023.
Every month, the Orange County Coastkeeper schedules a cleanup in the beaches at Huntington Beach and San Clemente, along with flood channels and other locations.
Irene Cordero is the cleanups coordinator for Orange County Coastkeeper. Her job is to make sure that the cleanup is ready to go with the right equipment.
“As the cleanups coordinator, my main job is to coordinate public and private cleanups,” she said. “It’s really important to us that through this cleanup program, we pick up trash in our communities to prevent it from making it into our waterways and eventually ocean.”
Along with cleaning up the environment, the organization’s focus is also to alert the Orange County community on how much trash is left behind with the consequences that may occur in the future and convince them to volunteer and help cleanup with them.
“We just want to introduce Orange County and our community members to volunteer opportunities and to get them involved in the environment through a low stakes opportunity,” Cordero said. “We make it really easy for people to participate; we make sure there’s free accessible to free parking. We give everyone supplies trash pickers, bags, buckets. So essentially, we make it super easy so that people can participate and the goal is to get them involved once and introduce them to simple environmental issues and then hopefully, keep their attention and get them involved in other environmental stuff.”
According to the Orange County Coastkeeper, the organization had over 6,000 volunteers show up to help since 2023.
From the last couple of cleanups by the organization, Cordero is happy about the amount of people that showed up, but for some other locations, there is some concern.
“On our Huntington cleanups, we get about 200 to 250 people coming out, but then at other locations like [the Costa Mesa Flood Channel is] where the capacity is just a little bit smaller,” she said. “We’re just really lucky that we have community members that are excited and want to come out and help so really, I give the credit to our community for just wanting to be a part of this organization and getting involved in our volunteer opportunities for sure.”
Plenty of volunteers enjoyed helping the Orange County Coastkeeper clean up the environment. Like Kurt Prange, he volunteered to help for the first time when the organization scheduled a flood channel cleanup at Costa Mesa on April 20.
“I had a great time,” he said. “It was fun putting on the boots and getting a little dirty out there.”
Others like Lillian Hollar had volunteered plenty of times in the past.
“It’s good to see people being community with people, but then also doing good work at the same time,” she said. “I think like living in California, it’s huge.”
They explain how important it is to them to pick up trash. Prange says that people need to keep it clean for a long time.
“It’s very important,” Prange said. “We got to make sure that we keep a good environment for future generations.”
Hollar says that volunteering will not only help the environment, but will also help other people socially as they can make new friends along the way.
“Volunteering is a great way to meet people and like get to know each other,” she said. “People are so friendly. Coastkeeper is amazing and like setting it up and explaining everything and making it easy. So you just have to show up and you’ll be good.”
It is important to people to keep the environment clean as there is an occasional event every year to convince thousands of people around California to go out and help.
California Coastal Cleanup Day is an important day to not only Orange County Coastkeeper, but for the rest of California. It is a day where awareness is being delivered to all of California on how much the environment is suffering because of the amount of trash that people leave behind on the ground and show them how they can save it. This event occurs every September.
The environment is getting good help from people in the Orange County community, but it could always use more help.
The organization’s next cleanup will be at San Clemente on May 4.
The rest of the schedule for future cleanups is available on their website.
