Residents Band Together to Clean Up Alamitos Beach

Long Beach is known for its vibrant nightlife with its electric hub for food, culture and community. The city is also known for its daytime activities such as its famous waterfront attraction, the Queen Mary, the Aquarium of the Pacific, the city’s acceptance of walkability and bike-friendly, inclusiveness of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, and the sprawling architecture the city prides itself with. The city also houses approximately seven miles of public beach and bays that it offers to residents and visitors according to the Long Beach Bureau of Environmental Health.

Lined with the beautiful coastlines to enjoy a morning walk on the sand and an afternoon swim in the water, but according to Long Beach resident of eight years, Brenda Loughery, the beach is not the destination outsiders think it is.

“I live in the neighborhood and I use this beach all the time,” said Loughery. “I take my dogs out here and I want them to be clean. I can see how littered it gets and I want to help keep it clean. This is part of my neighborhood.”

The Alamitos Beach Clean Up is one of many organizations that gathers on the coast of Long Beach. Needing to pass the baton, past organizers were in need to find someone to take over to start the new year. Pam Chotiswatdi, co-founder of the non-profit Peer Education Community Center, and volunteer of the beach clean up for many years decided to be the one to take the baton.

“So, my non-profit just stepped up to kind of take it over the organizing part this year,” said Chotiswatdi, the new event organizer.

Held every fourth Sunday from 10 to 11 a.m. at Alamitos Beach, the Alamitos Beach Clean Up organization gathers along the shore of Long Beach to pick up pounds of trash in a community-driven event. 

Founded in 2014 with the main focus on maintaining the beauty of the local environment and protecting marine life by cleaning up beach pollution, which is the harmful substance that contaminates the shores and waters, this can range from oil spills to the litter that people leave behind according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since 2015, Alamitos Beach Clean Up has collected 7,094 pounds of trash according to their website, and expects to keep adding on to that number each month.

Just this month on Feb. 23, Pam and the Alamitos Beach Clean Up were able to gather roughly 30 volunteers. In an hour that they were together, the group was able to collect 417 pounds of trash from Alamitos Beach.

Surrounded by many clean up organizations in the city such as Ocean Blue Project, Justin Rudd 30-minute beach cleanup, Heal the Bay and Surfrider Foundation, Alamitos Beach Clean Up can gather the local community to come together, providing free parking and supplies to participants in the event and welcomes anybody to participate.

“Come out here and visit us on Sunday, bring some friends because it is nice to have a little conversation while you’re doing it,” said Chotiswatdi.

Although Long Beach regularly receives grades between A and C for the quality of their water and bacterial levels within state standard, always finding itself outside the dirtiest beach rankings according to Heal the Bay annual report, why do residents think otherwise?

Jose Jimenez, volunteer of the Alamitos Beach Clean Up, said that the beach is “always really dirty.”

Volunteers from outside the city also have the same sentiments.

“I go to a lot of beaches and this one is really bad,” said Adriana Timoney, volunteer and Cerritos resident.

Carley Castro, Long Beach resident since 2019, had her eyes opened to the amount of trash on the floor.

“You see all the little, tiny things, like the amount of trash that’s out here, it just makes you think more about how we are treating the planet,” said Castro. “It’s just a few hundred yards that we are covering here, but there’s so much trash, it’s wild to me.”

With every clean up, Chotiswatdi provides a history lesson to the participants, and for the month of February she talks about the breakwater. Built in 1941, this two-mile-long rock wall was built for two purposes, to shelter the army’s ships and prevent waves from coming to and flooding the city. But this wall of rocks has had another effect on the beaches of Long Beach.

According to PBS SoCal, the combination of the Los Angeles River trash runoff and Long Beach breakwater, which serves as a plug in a sink, makes an unlikable team up that gathers trash that lingers and worsen after the city receives rain.

“It just sits here, it has nowhere to go,” said Chotiswatdi.

With trash piling up every day, cleaning once a month may have limited impact cleaning only the shoreline, but some people see this action as more than just cleaning.

“I think that by people coming here and volunteering and seeing people putting in the effort, it encourages people to maybe simply throw their trash away, help keep the community clean, and those little ways are probably gonna have a bigger impact than us picking up anything,” said Alex Singer, who recently moved to Long Beach from Arizona.

“Just by being out here and having other people see the community is involved in helping to keep it clean and this is not a neglected part of the beach,” said Loughery. “I think that type of awareness helps people not only hopefully be involved in the cleanup but also be more conscious about not littering in the first place.”