Sustainable Living: Cleaning Georgia's most popular beach
Standing on the pier looking down the beach most people focus on the water not the litter. But then again, I understand that my club members are not most people. The Design for Sustainability Club began to work with local organizations to clean Tybee Beach and educate the public in the winter of 2017. We had discovered the beach cleanup via a class project that put a grade value on community service. My co founders and I decided a day on the beach (even if we were picking up litter) was better than anything else, so we became regulars. But, after talking with the Tybee Clean Beach Volunteers founder Tim we began to realize we were simply bandaging a growing issue. With every plastic straw, styrofoam container, cigarette butt, and beer can we were finding it was simply the top of a proverbial iceberg. People didn't understand their effect on oceanic health and local businesses weren't practicing sustainable business models. In order to meet this problem before it ever touched the sand we needed to take our mission off the beach and into people's understanding.
At first we would talk to anyone who would ask why a bunch of college girls were wandering a beach with bright green buckets and trash grabber tools, chasing down plastic bags as if they had stolen our phone. This led to the startling realization on how little people seemed to know about the lifecycle of their trash. People did not realize that their disposable diapers were not bio-degradable, had never thought about the fact that the cigarette butts released toxic chemicals as they broke down. We educated where we could and worked to decipher a longer term strategy. Tim and Kathryn from Tybee Clean Beach Volunteers and Fight Dirty Tybee came up with the idea of a long time partnership; with SCAD students helping design educational posters, large form art installations, and sustainable business proposals while they tackled the city government. As half of our club had left in the spring semester for Lacoste France, the remaining group of us attacked the goals with all the vigor a sleep deprived, over worked college student could. We set up a booth at the Savannah Earth Day Festival, educating passerby on the longterm danger their litter posed while having children "fish" trash with lifespans written on them from a kiddie pool. By the end of the day we were dead tired and completely exhilarated by the change we had seen. People seemed interested, ready to learn, and willing to change once they realized the inadvertent danger they had posed for sea life. We could see that this initiative was going to make a difference, even if it was only for a single day.
Our next project was to create a large scale public art installation to encourage people to properly dispose of cigarette butts. After some careful thought process (and a bit of last minute creativity) we settled on using plotter tubes from the architecture department to create over sized cigarettes we could plant in the sand with a sign that said "The beach is not an ash tray." We spent the next month pilfering the large cardboard tubes from the recycling before the custodial staff took them out to the trash bins. Finally we had accrued over 30 tubes and a bit of a plan. Unfortunately that plan had not taken into account the fact that this was all happening in the midst of finals. We carefully painted the tubes to look like cigarettes and then I drove out to Tybee to install it during the next beach clean up. The cigarette butts were planted, almost haphazardly across the front of a large pile of sand, a group of party people looking down from above perplexed. As I planted these tubes I could hear passerby muttering, wondering what a tiny blond woman was doing. But as people came up and talked to us, a dialogue opened, and soon the party people on the dune above were beginning to collect their old butts and tossing them in my trash bin. As I drove back to Savannah that night a deep calm had settled over me, it was nice to know we were making a difference.
As we restart this semester we refocus on large scale education, pushing for a greater understanding and lifestyle changes. With the study abroad students back we are excited to push forward and continue our initiative for a cleaner beach and a more sustainable future.
