SOLANA BEACH — At the base of the newly-paved Fletcher Cove beach access ramp, visitors will see a brightly-painted wooden box holding an array of toys to enjoy for a day at the beach.
The Beach Toy Borrow Box, unveiled by city leaders and members of Girl Scout Troop 2200 on Thursday, aims to reduce plastic waste in the ocean by allowing visitors to borrow and return toys as needed, rather than bringing or buying their own.
Troop 2200 partnered with the city to make the box a reality. The scouts, who are in kindergarten, and their parents built and painted ocean scenes on the box and donated the toys.
“Plastic toys left out at the beach are too often swept out into the ocean. They’re battered by the wave and broken down into smaller and smaller pieces,” said Mayor Lesa Heebner. “We love that you are creating a beach toy borrow box so that when people go to the beach, they don’t have to bring toys, you can borrow toys.”
The borrow box is set up alongside a waste pickup basket station at the entrance to the beach. This is another recent sustainability initiative, implemented in April, that allows beachgoers to take a basket to hold their trash and drop it back off when they leave the beach.
City Sustainability Manager Nicole Grucky said that after implementing the pickup station, the city was seeking a similar initiative and came up with the idea for a toy box, similar to those set up in Oceanside and at Torrey Pines State Beach.
“When we launched the pickup station, one of our Parks and Rec commissioners asked, ‘what’s another thing that we can do,’ and the beach toy borrow box came up. Then we reached out to the Girl Scouts,” Grucky said.
Another waste pickup station is located at Seascape Sur, and there are also stations in neighboring Del Mar.
Solana Beach also recently completed a repaving project for the ramp down to Fletcher Cove, which is the city’s main access point to the beach. The project also added another shower tower area at the base of the ramp, in addition to the existing showers at the park above.
The final phase of the project, the replacement of the dissipator grate at the bottom of the ramp, has yet to be completed.
