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Tarbabe
Recycling Club Teams With Heal the Bay for Creek Cleanup
Effort in honor
of Earth Day removes 20,000 pounds of waste from small stretch of waterway
By
Allison Jean Eaton
Bulletin Staff Writer
COMPTON – With
sweat beading on their foreheads and a sweltering sun pelting down
on their backs, Catalina Garcia, 23, and Luis DeAnda, 24, dug into
and tore at the earth surrounding an old, mostly-buried tire along
the western shore of Compton Creek.
“It’s pretty nasty out here,” said Garcia as she
stood up to wipe sweat from her brow and surveyed mounds of debris
dotting the
sloped portion of the embankment.
The Carson residents were among scores of volunteers donning rubber
gloves and thigh-high boots Saturday, April 26 for a cleanup sponsored
by Heal the Bay and the Compton High School Recycling Club.
In honor of Earth Day, which this year fell on a Tuesday, the volunteers
braved the heat to remove accumulated waste and bulky items illegally
dumped along the soft-bottomed portion of the tributary behind the
casino and adjacent to the 91 Freeway.
Lili Jordan, a Spanish teacher at Compton High and adviser to the school’s
recycling club, said this is the first year the two-year-old club has
partnered with Heal the Bay.
The club formed after Jordan showed her student’s the film “An
Inconvenient Truth.”
“I showed the Al Gore movie, and their assignment was to come
up with ideas” on what they could do to help the environment,
she said. Starting the club, which collects and recycles bottles and
cans thrown
away on campus and uses the proceeds to beautify the campus, was their
idea.
To date, the group has planted flowers throughout campus and purchased
benches for students to sit and enjoy the scenery. Jordan said the
club is currently aspiring to plant a vegetable garden.
The club, which boasts 35 members, handled the bulk of the organizing
for the cleanup event in addition to individual members’ pitching
in and cleaning up.
Recycling Club member Edlin Cornejo, 17, was tasked that morning with
running down the safety rules with volunteers just arriving. She described
herself as a “tree-hugging freak.”
“It feels good to know that I’m actually doing something
and that I’m party of changing something,” she said. “Change
is good.”
She said the club has also ridden the Metro Blue Line into Long Beach
to participate in beach cleanups there.
Compton Creek is the last major tributary of the Los Angeles River
before it empties out into the ocean, said Heal the Bay’s Meredith
McCarthy. All of the catch basins north of Compton Creek empty here.
“That’s why it’s so important to get the litter out
of this stretch,” she said.
It’s also partly why the creek is notorious for a high volume
of waste within its waters and littering its shores. Besides being
a popular dumping site, much of the trash and debris polluting the
creek originate from further upstream and flow down into the city’s
portion of the waterway.
Among the items recovered were tires, children’s toys, blankets
and clothing, car parts, mattress spring coils, a bowling ball and
a golf ball. Altogether, about 20,000 pounds of waste was removed from
the watershed, McCarthy said.
Heal the Bay sponsors cleanups for the watershed twice yearly, in honor
of April’s Earth Day and September’s Coastal Cleanup Day.
Not all of the day’s youthful volunteers were from Compton High – some
came from as far away as the San Fernando Valley. And not all of them
were teenagers.
Seven-year-old Alex Davis, who attends 156th Street School, participated
in the cleanup with her mother. For her, cleaning up the creek that
day was a something of a religious experience.
“It makes God feel good,” she said. “And it’s
pretty easy.”
Davis was part of a group including 18-year-old Galilel Lizaola.
“I came out today just to see how trashy this place is, and to
make it better,” Lizaola told The Bulletin. “We have to
clean it up.”
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