Community Corner

It's Coastal Cleanup Weekend ... Want to Help?

Keeping our waterways clear of trash and debris is the goal, and it only takes a few hours of your time.

You call yourself environmentally conscious? You call yourself "green"? You call yourself proud to be a Novato resident?

The California Coastal Cleanup crew is looking a few hours of your time this weekend.

Similar to the city's Clean & Green Day, the annual Coastal Cleanup is about people putting on boots and gloves to pick up trash and debris around our city and nearby unincorporated areas. But with this effort, the focus is on water resources such as ponds, creeks and marshes.

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There are two Coastal Cleanups in Novato — one at and one at Hamilton. It's the first time for the southern Novato effort at Hamilton Wetlands and Bel Marin Keys.

Five team captains will rally the troops at 9 a.m. Saturday at the gazebo at Scottsdale Pond. After a briefing, they'll fan out to spots along Novato Creek and Warner Creek to collect junk and place it into bags for pickup later on. It should be three hours of work followed by a team hug and high-fives.

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This is a key opportunity for high schoolers who are looking for community service hours to graduate. The organizers will provide community service forms and sign off on donated hours.

With a laugh, organizer Susan Stompe said lots of teens "wait until the last semester of their senior year and then try to cram in all that service time. Kids are kids! Hopefully we'll have some of them show up."

Parents with young children can stick around the Scottsdale Pond and Scottsdale Marsh areas rather than hoofing it through the creeks, Stompe said. Occasionally the creek crews come across homeless encampments, which are best left for police and city public works crews.

"We feel for the homeless," she said, "but accumulation of trash is not a healthy situation. When we're talking about creek cleanup, all that trash flows into the bay, and the bay flows into the ocean. Plastics get more and more toxic as they begin to break down, so we have to get as much we can picked up and disposed of properly."

For more about the Scottsdale Pond-based group, .

In Hamilton/Bel Marin Keys, they'll have a two-day campaign — Saturday and Sunday — to clean up the eastern sectors of Novato Creek and the bay shoreline. The meeting place at 9 a.m. Saturday is at the Todd Road entrance to the Hamilton Wetlands, near the Novato Skate Park. The meeting place at 9 a.m. Sunday is the . For more on this group, .

The heartier volunteers should bring boots and gloves for stomping down in the creekbeds.

In 2011, more than 82,000 volunteers involved in the Coastal Cleanup effort removed more than 1.2 million pounds of trash and recyclables from our beaches, lakes, and waterways.


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