A small group of young college students hosted a beach cleanup at Belmont Shore in Long Beach on Aug. 31 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Amy Brown, an LBCC fashion major, created the event and promoted through her Instagram inviting people to come clean up Belmont Shore.

“I really love the beach, I come very often and I see trash everywhere and I wanted to do more for the place that I love so much.” says Brown.

Brown has had experience cleaning up beaches and has done it once before with a bigger group. “I did do one when I was in middle school and it was for a bigger organization and that was really nice.” said Brown.

Brown was assisted by two others, Aaron Sauceda, an electrical engineering major at Cerritos College and Kris Golden, a film student at New York University.

“I wanted to do something productive to make up for being unproductive,” Golden said.

Brown provided them with trash bags and gloves and they began cleaning up the beach.

They were all shocked about how much trash they found on the beach.

Things like styrofoam, pens and even cigarettes all were found along the shore.

“There was a lot more trash than I expected there to be, and even though it doesn’t look like there’s trash from afar, it’s these tiny plastics – picking them up really adds it all together,” said Sauceda.

This would align with how much plastic really goes into our oceans; it’s estimated that 11 million tons of plastic enters the ocean according to Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.

Golden felt she was doing her part to prevent this issue of plastics getting into the ocean and affecting sea creatures “It felt like every piece of trash I picked up I was saving a fish.”

“Seeing how easy it can be and seeing what difference can be made in an hour was really encouraging.” said Brown. She stated that she felt she was doing her part to help the environment.

To the group’s surprise the cleanup didn’t feel like a chore, but instead was much more fun than expected.

“I think anything is fun when you do it with friends,” said Golden.

Cleaning up the beach was not only positive for the environment but for these participants as they all agreed that they felt good about themselves and received praise from people at the beach.

This positivity made them more open to doing these activities in the future.

“I would do something like this again, I should,” said Golden.

Brown plans to continue hosting beach cleanups in the future and even spreading out to other local beaches such as Santa Monica and Huntington Beach.