Where cleaning up is nothing new

While other kids played in the sand on Thursday, 8-year-old Laura MacKenzie was happy to be picking trash off the beach.

“I think that if you pollute, you’re killing everything that lives here, and my heart is for animals,” she said.

“The more we pollute, the animals [around here] will become extinct, even the animals that feed on these ones will die and then the chain will fall apart,” Laura explained.

Scores of kids in several groups gathered trash along the beach at Big Corona as part of Newport Beach’s “Clean Our Beach” day.

The city’s Summer Day Camp sent campers to Big Corona and Balboa beaches armed with blue trash bags and a lesson in the importance of keeping the city’s beaches clean.

The Clean Beaches Council, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., designated June 29 through July 5 as National Beach Clean Week.

The Community Youth Center Camp was the group at Big Corona, and kids 6 to 12 years old participated in a friendly competition aimed at collecting as much trash as possible. The winning group would be judged by the volume of trash collected.

Fortunately for this group, in spite of the Fourth of July holiday, the beach wasn’t any dirtier than usual, according to Sean Levin, Newport Beach Recreation Superintendent.

Levin said the city’s general services maintenance crew do an excellent job of cleaning the beaches, and that by the time his group arrived at 1:30 p.m., the volume of trash wasn’t any worse than he’d seen in previous weeks.

For kids attending the summer camp on a regular basis, cleaning up after themselves and others is nothing new.

The camp operates five days a week from late June through the end of August, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays are designated beach days.

Jessica Reiten, recreation coordinator for the city of Newport Beach, said the campers typically spend 20 minutes right after lunch picking up their trash and the garbage in the surrounding area.

“We told them we want to keep the beaches clean for their kids,” Reiten said.