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Groups partner to clean up local beaches

News Photo by Jordan Spence Meag Schwartz and Phineas Imhoff, 14, clean up Mich-e-ke-wis beach Thursday in Alpena.

ALPENA — All of the fun on the July Fourth holiday can produce a lot of trash.

To combat anything left over from the day’s festivities, groups have partnered across the state and in Alpena to pick up trash.

“We are here at Alpena’s local beaches to do a trash cleanup after the fireworks. It’s a really busy time of the year, so we need to keep our beaches clean to promote tourism,” Northeast Michigan Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative Network Coordinator Meag Schwartz said.

Schwartz said NEMIGLSI partnered with Huron Pines AmeriCorps and the groups traveled to different local beaches to ensure as much trash as possible was collected.

“It’s an official program from the Alliance for the Great Lakes. A lot of cleanups take place on July 5 to prevent the trash from getting into the Great Lakes and in this case getting into Lake Huron,” Huron Pines AmeriCorp Education Coordinator Hannah Hazewinkel said.

According to the Alliance for the Great Lakes more than 22 million pounds of plastics in particular ends up in the Great Lakes’ waters every year.

The Alliance said the issue with plastic is it never totally decomposes. Plastic just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. During the cleanups, the Alliance said 15,000 volunteers remove about 18 tons of trash Great Lakes beaches. More than 85 percent of the of the debris they pick up is made up of plastic.

Plastics FLOAT 4-H club member Phineas Imhoff, 14, attended the cleanup and said he wants to keep the beaches clean.

“We like to clean up the beach because a lot of people just throw stuff on the beach,” he said.

The 4-H club works in the community to prevent the use of disposable plastics and help pick them up and clean up trash found.

Jordan Spence can be reached via email at jspence@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5687.

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