A beach full of butts -- St. Catherine's students clean up Samuel Myers Park

By David Steinkraus

Sunday, September 18, 2005 2:07 AM CDT

RACINE - They weighed and then weighed again just to be sure. In the end they were sure; they'd taken 57 pounds of garbage off the beach and out of the grass at Samuel Myers Park in Racine.

They are students at St. Catherine's High School, all of whom came out on Saturday morning at the invitation of the school's Environment Club to take part in the International Coastal Cleanup. It started in Texas in 1985, when a member of The Ocean Conservancy was appalled by the amount of trash she found along a beach.

In Racine, the trash is surprising and not surprising. Students found an intact sign, an unopened can of beer, candy wrappers and plenty of other food wrappers.

"But there were hundreds and hundreds of cigarette butts, and I don't even think it's possible to pick up as many as there were. It was just like astronomical amounts, like there were just clumps of them," said Anne Totero, 17, a St. Catherine's

senior.

"I collected probably around 200," said senior Adrienne Piette, 17.

They tallied the butts and came up with 500, give or take, and that wasn't all of them.

They found a purse and some shoe soles, too, said senior Kyle Roeder, 18, the club's chairman.

Then there was the mystery plastic, about 30 pieces of roughly the same size and shape, and no one knew what it was, he said.

"I'd say about 99 percent of all the trash we found was plastic," said junior Diara Laurino, 17.

The other big fraction was glass, she said: "Broken glass. I don't think I saw anything intact that was glass."

There were some dead birds, too, recently dead, and Melissa Warner, a St. Catherine's teacher and the club's advisor, said she intended to ask if the Racine Health Department is interested in them - in these days of West Nile virus when health officials are interested in dead blue jays and crows. Yes, the students wore gloves when they picked up trash.

Some students spent time in the water, too, taking samples to check for the presence of E. coli bacteria, commonly used as a measure of contamination by human and animal waste. And some just had fun. "Oooo, there's little fishes!" said Sarin Tellez as she took a swipe through the water with her net. She's a 14-year-old freshman who is just starting with the club, and on Saturday morning she had a pair of waders, that net and a desire to find out what was in the water.

Aside from the fish, which was only about 1 inch long and which escaped, she and another student found a worm and a small creature that looked like a shrimp. It's likely a scud, an animal which fills about the same ecological niche as the shrimp which populate oceans, Warner said.

As the cleanup drew to an end, Tellez seemed reluctant to stay on shore.

"That was fun," she said.

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