ENCINITAS – Ryan Wick, 6, had a simple question for her mom, Jess, on Saturday morning.
Ryan just found a third can that had been discarded in bushes along Delphinium Street near the intersection with Encinitas Boulevard.
“Why don’t they just find the trash and put it in?” she asked.
“That’s a good question, Ryan,” Jess said.
They were among 20 people who gathered in the parking lot of the San Dieguito Union High School District on Saturday as part of Encinitas Street Stewards’ monthly cleanup efforts.
Street Stewards is the brainchild of executive directors Aaron Null and Scott Horst. The duo gave a presentation to the Encinitas Environmental Commission on their efforts to clean up Ocean Beach and their broader goals for the project.
Street Stewards also seeks to get people to “Adopt a Block” in order to facilitate cleanups as part of a patchwork network of volunteers interested in seeing their communities more hygienic and without waste in shared spaces.
Two members of the commission – John Wick, who is also Ryan’s dad, and Mark O’Connor – were listening.
“We thought, ‘Gosh, that sounds cool,’” Wick said. “So we started the Encinitas chapter.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re in,” O’Connor said he remembered thinking after the presentation.
In addition to getting residents to adopt their own blocks in Encinitas and throughout the region, the captains of Encinitas Street Stewards began organizing get-togethers on the second Saturday of the month. Wick said Encinitas Mayor Bruce Ehlers, who picked up trash on Saturday, is a regular.
Volunteers enjoy refreshments of pastries and coffee before splitting up with plastic bags, buckets, latex gloves and pick-up tools to scour the streets and sidewalks for trash.
Wick said that regularly removing trash from shared public spaces has a compounding effect over time.
The team also track everything that gets collected.
“Data is king,” O’Connor said.
As part of the April haul, the volunteers collected 103 pounds of trash and almost 400 cigarette butts. Overall, they have gathered 900 pounds of debris and 4,000 cigarette butts during the monthly efforts, according to Wick.
O’Connor is also an active member of the San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. He said he felt compelled to get involved in environmental causes after coming across a piece of plastic trash on the beach.
“I couldn’t step over it, because I was a boy scout,” he said. “I found my people.”
Jonathan Moore, a Leucadia resident, said he was drawn to the Encinitas Street Stewards because of something he had already been doing before school with his daughter Eliza, 10.
The two would walk around their neighborhood and pick up trash as a way to wake up and get moving in the morning. A neighbor told them to look up the Street Stewards because, Moore said, “we were already cleaning up our area.”
Eliza said her favorite part about picking up trash was “helping the earth.”
Erica Fries said her daughters Della, 6, and Liv, 4, have become much more aware of trash around town, ways they can positively impact their surroundings as well as broader efforts to save the planet.
Though, she jokes that something else represented the actual top draw for the girls.
“The donuts,” Erica said. “That is the number one.”
