Santa Clara County’s Coastal Cleanup Day continues to benefit local creeks, as volunteers from last Saturday increased by 50%, and pounds of trash collected decreased by 23% since last year.
Coastal Cleanup Day is a statewide event where volunteers across California work to keep waterways, creeks and coastlines clean. In Santa Clara County, crews focus on cleaning creeks to prevent plastic from reaching the Bay, and eventually the ocean, where it dangerously interferes with marine life.
According to Nicholas Ingram, Creek Connections Action Group chair, Santa Clara County is succeeding in its mission to increase volunteer engagement while decreasing the amount of trash collected.
“Across all 56 [Santa Clara County] sites we had over 1,400 volunteers participate, who removed more than 25,300 pounds of trash,” Ingram said.
According to the Valley Water annual report, the amount of trash collected this year is a dramatic decrease from the 32,874 pounds of trash collected in 2024, meaning that the waterways stayed cleaner.
Ingram said getting people outside and engaged is the real achievement of the initiative.
“We try not to focus on the trash metric too much and focus more on volunteer engagement,” Ingram says. “A big part of what we’re trying to achieve with this event is to get people outside and have them take an active stewardship role.”
Volunteering across California decreased after the COVID 19 pandemic, according to the California Coastal Commission. Last year, only 953 volunteers showed up to volunteer in Santa Clara County, while over 1,400 participated on Saturday.
“These are the highest numbers we’ve [the Santa Clara Valley Water District] seen since the pandemic,” Ingram said.
This year, the Coastal Commission offered to all the regional coordinators to offer prizes to volunteers for cleaning up trash, such as $1000 cash prizes, e-bikes, and paid stays at luxury hotels.
According to Ingram, prizes were left out of the event to keep all sites fair and keep the focus on the community.
“We [the Santa Clara Valley Water District] chose to opt out, for keeping the focus on helping the community; [to] not make it about prizes, but focusing people on going out collecting trash,” Ingram says. “Also for fairness because we have so many sites, we wouldn’t be able to have a prize at all of them.”
According to Kirsten Druve, the Palo Alto site coordinator working with Santa Clara Valley Water District, trash left on the streets always finds its way back into the waterways when it rains.
“The trash that is on the streets or the trails washes into the creek and then gets ingested by marine animals, entangles them or becomes tiny microplastics that aren’t good for us when we eat the fish,” Druve said.
Druve said the most common items they pull from creeks add up quickly.
“We find a lot of food service ware, like Starbucks cups or take-out clam shells or beverage containers,” Druve said. “We find a lot of … cans and water bottles, general plastic, paper napkins or paper blowing from people’s trucks. Styrofoam, not as much, but we track it separately, because it’s banned in Palo Alto.”
According to junior Madelena Buxton, she joined this cleanup to help the environment.
“I wanted to be able to do something to help the environment, even if it’s something small, like picking up a few pieces of trash,” Buxton said.
Buxton said the collective effort of the day is what makes a difference.
“It [this cleanup] is actually making a big impact because it’s not just this cleanup, but there’s many cleanups going on today,” Buxton said. “It’s reducing a lot of the plastic pollution that’s around the area, which is great.”
The Creek Connections Action Group or the City of Palo Alto calendar has details for future cleanups including a cleanup in celebration of National River Cleanup Day on May 17.