April 2024 Earth Month Cleanup!
To celebrate Earth Month, we held our beach cleanup at Alamitos Beach! In this case we had a competition between people's favorite tshirt colors from the past! In 2 hours we cleaned up 17,685 items, bringing our total tally up to 212,537 items! Our team counts are: 1st to last place: Light blue (5,072), Gray (4,518), Red (3,947), Yellow (2,000), White (1,196) and Cobalt Blue (952).
June 2023 ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference Beach Cleanup
The group hosted their summer beach cleanup in the afternoon for the first time ever! We welcomed conference attendees for the ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference. In this cleanup, we collected 12,624 items, bringing our running total to 170,847! For this cleanup, we sported our favorite tshirt designs over the years!
2023 Earth Week Beach Cleanup
In honor of Earth Day, we held our spring beach cleanup in April this year. We partnered with the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Annenberg Civic Engagement, and Assignment Earth to have our biggest cleanup yet! Our low estimate was 45,689 items, a new record for us. Our collective count is now 158,223 items that we have diverted away from the ocean! We are so grateful to all the volunteers for helping us in our mission.
High school student, Ryan Kim, wrote about his experience. Read here:
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March 2023 USC Alumni Day of SCervice Alamitos Beach Cleanup
Co-organized with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies for the USC Alumni Day of SCervice. We had over 50 participants who collected approximately 35,000 items (we lost count quite a few times) in this cleanup of Alamitos Beach! Thanks to 5th year grad student, Yvonne Manjarrez, for designing these t-shirts inspired by the Barbie Girl song.
September 2022 Alamitos Beach Cleanup
We held our first cleanup of Alamitos Beach for our Fall 2022 Beach Cleanup. It was shocking how dirty this beach was, and we are grateful to Professor Anne McNeil from the University of Michigan for suggesting it to us. Our goal was to reach 50,000 items collected total, which required around 8,000 items to be collected. We blew that goal out of the water, collecting over 34,694 items in 2 hours! This brings us to a total of 77,534 items total since we started our cleanups. Congratulations to team "Polyher" for collecting the most items (8,482) and receiving prizes of sustainable household products. Big thank you to Chris Kosloski-Oh for designing the tshirts for this cleanup!
May 2022 Hermosa Beach Cleanup
Memorial Day Turned into a parking challenge for this beach cleanup (so we are really impressed with our volunteers who beat the crowds and made it out)! In this cleanup we still collected 6,073+ items (sometimes we lose count so all numbers are low). Our winning team was just Two people, Dmitry and Olga, who collected 1,129 items between the two of them! Thanks to all for coming out.
September 2021 Hermosa Beach Cleanup
We finally returned to our in person beach cleanups of Hermosa Beach! Including remote volunteers, who cleaned in locations near them, we collected 6,713 items! We had participants from many different departments, including Chemistry, Biology, Environmental Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Public Policy, Theatre, Business, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Pharmacy, Architecture, Computer Science, Astronautical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Medical Biophysics. Thank you to all who participated in helping our mission. Also, a big thank you to Rika Mizoguchi, a Wrigley Environmental Communications Summer Intern, for designing our t-shirts! Also, thank you to the Fieser group for catching some awesome photos.
August 2021 (USC Alumni Day of SCervice)
Co-organized with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies for the USC Alumni Day of SCervice. We had over 50 participants who collected 3,421+ items in this cleanup of Hermosa Beach! Thanks to Environmental Communications Intern, Julia Lin, for designing these t-shirts inspired by well-known commercial phrases. Big thanks (and credit) to Antony Boshier for taking the awesome photos!
November 2020 Socially Distanced Neighborhood Cleanup
During the pandemic, we weren't able to safely gather to cleanup Hermosa Beach. Instead, we decided to host a Virtual Socially Distanced Neighborhood Cleanup Challenge, in collaboration with the UCS Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. We were also thrilled to get support from other USC leadership, including WiSE (Women in Science and Engineering) and President Folt! We had over 45 volunteers and picked up 6,555 pieces of trash!
February 2020 Hermosa Beach Cleanup
For our third beach cleanup, we partnered with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and extended our invite out of the chemistry department. We were thrilled to get volunteers from several other departments, including Biology and Earth Sciences. We even got new volunteers from people at the beach! We converted to an app for our data collection, and collected a whopping 6,460 pieces. The winning team, Sesame Street, collected 1,602 items (where they found a gold mine of smashed styrofoam). The more we do these cleanups, the more we understand how important it is. Thanks so much to all the volunteers!
We were also thrilled to have Maurice Roper, the USC Wrigley photographer, join us and take some amazing photos of our event.
We were also thrilled to have Maurice Roper, the USC Wrigley photographer, join us and take some amazing photos of our event.
May 2019 Hermosa Beach Cleanup
Our first beach cleanup! We collected 2,753 pieces of plastic, 255 cigarette butts, 71 metal items, and 55 paper items. This further solidifies the need to replace petroleum-based plastics, as well as the need to deal with the plastics already polluting our oceans. The Fieser Lab is excited to help both in the lab and on the beach itself!