Earth Month beach cleanup

What a day at the beach! On the morning of Saturday, April 29th, a group of more than 20 gathered at Chicago’s North Avenue Beach to participate in a cleanup day to celebrate Earth Month. Despite some light rain, staff and volunteers spent a few hours picking up zip ties, plastic packaging, polystyrene foam, bottle caps, straws and other trash. Lots of the trash collected included small pieces of plastic and other single-use plastics. 

Plastics, like those found during the cleanup at North Avenue Beach, enter the Great Lakes at a rate of nearly 22 million pounds each year, and just over half of that plastic ends up in Lake Michigan. Single-use plastics pollute our environment and injure or kill wildlife when mistaken for food. 

In addition to cleaning up the beach, staff and volunteers had the opportunity to support our campaign asking Whole Foods to reduce single-use plastic packaging, and to share their own story of reducing plastics in their own lives. Nothing that we use once should pollute our environment for hundreds of years, let’s protect the environment and our wildlife.