WILMETTE – Was September 16 the last beach day of the summer? Let’s hope not, but it was a glorious day for a beach cleanup sponsored by the Alliance of the Great Lakes and organized by the Rotary Club of Wilmette Harbor.
Approximately 60 students from Springman Middle School of Glenview gave up their Saturday morning to scour the beach at Gillson Park for garbage.
“The event is an excellent opportunity for the kids to have a volunteer experience. You get to see them in a new environment. It’s just fun,” Manos Ginis, a teacher at Springman Middle School, told DailyNorthShore.
The students worked in groups, digging through the sand looking for bits of garbage. Each group officially recorded and tallied up the types of garbage found on a form provided by the Alliance for the Great Lakes. At the end of the event, all of the bags are weighed to determine how many pounds of garbage was picked up.
The clean-up usually yields about 30 to 50 pounds of garbage, according to Puran Stevens, a member of the Rotary Club. The club has been organizing the beach cleanup at Gillson Park for at least 10 years and this year’s event was on the same day as International Coastal Cleanup. Volunteers all over the world spent September 16 cleaning up lakes shores and coastal areas.
In 2016, volunteers picked up over 40,000 pounds of garbage along the shores of the Great Lakes, according to the Alliance for the Great Lakes’ website. The majority of that trash was plastic, which can harm the lakes and wild animals that live in them. Most of the litter found is caused by human activity, according to the group’s site.
Springman students said the most common items found on the Wilmette beach — which is cleaned regularly by the Park District — were cigarette butts, bottle caps, bits of plastic and paper. The strangest things found? A headless doll, 100 pistachio shells and some broccoli.
Some students viewed the cleanup like an altruistic game of who can collect the most garbage. “It is really nice that people came to do this. It is like a competition because we weigh the bags in the end,” Katie Allen, a sixth grade student, said.
But the importance of giving back to the community wasn’t lost on the students. “I think it is pretty here and a fun experience with friends. It is cool to see all that trash compressed in a bag that was spread out all over the beach,” Sophia Gyuk, an eighth grade student told DailyNorthShore.
For more information about the Alliance for the Great Lakes go to www.greatlakes.org.
Members of the Rotary Club of Wilmette Harbor and teachers from Springman Middle School at Gillson. From left to right, Jason Kaiz, Principal of Springman Middle School and Danielle Danno and Manos Ginis both teachers; Ben Ivory, Puran Stevens and Joan O’Neill members of the Rotary Club.
Springman sixth graders attending the cleanup event at Gillson Beach. Left to right, Addison Ehrhardt, Cece Biank, Violet Walsh, Katie Allen, Mia Costello and Zoey Costianis.