Alum Creek State Park Beach: Litter
On Thursday, September 18, 2025 Nicole Li and I visited the Alum Creek State Park Beach. We arrived at about 10am and left at around noon.
We observed: one woman alone, smoking cigarettes; a family of two adults and four children; two adults sitting in beach chairs; 4 boats on the water; two metal-detecting individuals wading in the water; 2 adults swimming; one person sitting in a beach chair; and 4 men walking. At 11:20am a man arrived with his dog off leash. The dog ran to the seagulls, scaring them off.
We also saw too many seagulls to count, one heron, one monarch butterfly, and one yellow butterfly.
The main purpose for the visit was to get a better sense of the amount of litter at the beach.
Nicole and I walked through a small section of the beach, with Nicole doing a more general sweep and myself walking back and forth systematically, both of us picking up whatever trash we noticed. We spent about an hour and a half picking up litter within a designated area (below). Our search covered about 2,100 square yards out of the 28,900 square yard beach, meaning we covered an approximate 6% of the beach. I covered less ground within the area than Nicole, because I was moving more systematically. Even after we finished, and I was geotagging the start and end points of the area, I kept noticing more trash.
We didn't notice any littering behavior, apart from possibly the woman who was sitting and smoking cigarettes within the area we were collecting trash.
What we collected
After leaving the beach, we categorized the 234 pieces of trash we had collected (shown below).
All categories
Plastic
Plastic – bottle caps (and metal bottle caps)
Cigarette (and other) butts
Paper
Rubber bands, metals/foils, and wooden sticks
String, band-aids, and organic waste
In total, we collected 234 pieces of trash. We collected 141 pieces of plastic alone. If the area we collected trash in is representative of the whole beach, then I would estimate that there was about 3,800 pieces of trash on the entire beach at the time we did our collection.
No generative AI was used in the creation of this post or its content.
