RACHEL JOHNSON
News Assistant
Members from the Malibu chapter of the Rotary Club partnered with Pepperdine Rotaract Club members Saturday to participate in a beach clean-up at Zuma Beach.
The event was called Rotary Cares Day — Clean Sweep the Beaches. Members of both clubs, along with their families, “joined with over a dozen local Rotary Clubs in District 5280 cleaning beaches from Malibu to San Pedro,” the Malibu Rotary Club Web site said.
William Boyd, Rotary International’s president for 2006-2007, declared to the Internal Assembly of Rotary Governors that he wanted to focus on water management, literacy, hunger and the Rotary community, according to the Web site. Water management was first on the list of goals and as a result, the beach clean-up project was born.
Club members and families worked to clean trash from the beach so the debris would not pollute the ocean. Malibu Rotary had 21 participants at Zuma Beach, including 10 Rotary members and spouses, six Rotaract members and five children.
Fortunately for the beaches, but perhaps unfortunately for the volunteers, there was little trash to pick up. Zuma Beach is well-maintained and cleaned often so some volunteers felt like they didn’t have a lot to do.
“There was very little trash on the beach as county crews do a good job of sweeping beach with tractors,” wrote John Elman, coordinator for the event, in an e-mail. “We therefore expanded our cleaning efforts to parking lot areas and Pacific Coast Highway and managed to pick up a few bags of trash so we could feel like we were doing something.”
According to Elman, the weather on Saturday was beautiful, and the group had a good time but there wasn’t much need for a cleaning. He wrote that the trash they accumulated over the course of the morning couldn’t have weighed more than 50 pounds.
Rotary and Rotaract members combined with Los Angeles County Beaches, the Surfrider Foundation and the Wyland Foundation in their clean-up efforts.
02-15-2007