By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
They found eyeglasses, fake flowers, bottles and plenty of plastic litter mixed in with the other trash that they picked up Sunday morning on Sea Isle City’s beaches and dunes.
Fortunately, Carolyn Beck, her sister Amy Ward and Ward’s daughter Marissa didn’t find anything nearly as gross as what they saw during another beach cleanup.
“I think the yuckiest thing we ever found was underwear,” Amy Ward said, shaking her head in disgust.
The three women made the hour-plus drive Sunday to the shore from their home in Somerdale, N.J., to volunteer once again for Sea Isle’s annual spring beach cleanup – only to find out that the event was canceled because of high winds and is now scheduled for April 22.
But instead of heading back home, they grabbed a large trash bag and began scouring the beach and dunes for litter during their own, improvised cleanup.
“We thought we might as well stay and pick up some trash,” Beck said.
“We love this place. We’ll do anything we can do to make it nicer,” Amy Ward added about their affinity for Sea Isle.
Marissa Ward said that perhaps the most unusual things they found were two pairs of eyeglasses and some fake flowers. In addition to the discarded plastic and other run-of-the mill litter they removed, the women also picked up a large trash bag already filled with plenty of trash.
One pleasant surprise was what they didn’t find: cigarette butts. Amy Ward noted that in previous years, there was an abundance of discarded cigarette butts littering the beaches and dunes.
“There used to be a million,” she said with some hyperbole. “That used to be the thing we picked up the most.”
On Sunday morning, Amy said she didn’t see any cigarette butts as she walked along the beach and dunes.
She believes that a statewide smoking ban that took effect Jan. 1, 2019, at New Jersey’s beaches and public parks is the reason for a significant reduction in the number of cigarette butts littering Sea Isle’s shoreline.
“It’s working,” she said.
The state gave shore communities the discretion to either ban smoking altogether or designate small areas where beachgoers could still light up. Sea Isle imposed a complete smoking ban on its beaches.
In Sea Isle, the number of cigarette butts found on the beaches and dunes during annual community cleanups conducted both in the spring and fall has been dropping ever since the smoking ban started, according to the city’s Environmental Commission.
The Environmental Commission, in partnership with the state environmental group Clean Ocean Action, organizes Sea Isle’s beach cleanups each year. Traditionally, the volunteers include families, community organizations, companies, school groups and other environmentally conscious people.
Each year, Environmental Commission Chairwoman Annette Lombardo stresses the importance of keeping Sea Isle’s beaches in pristine condition to make a good impression on vacationers. She has been a member of the Environmental Commission for 32 years and has served as its chairwoman for the last 22.
“Basically, it’s to make the town look nice, to protect the environment and to keep junk out of the ocean,” Lombardo said in an interview Sunday.
The beach cleanup planned for this weekend was undermined by bad weather. It was originally scheduled for Saturday, but rainy weather caused a switch to Sunday. However, the blustery conditions Sunday prompted the Environmental Commission to call it off.
“One girl went up there and said she couldn’t keep the trash bag from blowing away,” Lombardo said of one volunteer who was trying to pick up litter on the windy beach and dunes.
The event is scheduled now for Saturday, April 22, between 10 a.m. and noon. Signups will be next to Excursion Park in front of the Promenade at John F. Kennedy Boulevard
For each cleanup, members of the Environmental Commission hand out vinyl gloves and trash bags to the volunteers. The volunteers are also given a data card to record the types of trash and debris they find.
The Environmental Commission will compile a report later on analyzing the types of litter that were picked up and the amount.
