By Jeff Dennis
The litterbugs that leave plastic bottle caps and cigarette butts in the sand are a constant factor each summer, and the Edisto Beach Sweep event each Fall asks volunteers to clean it up.
On Saturday, September 18 at 9 a.m., volunteers arrived at Beach Access Number One to receive supplies from the Keep Edisto Beautiful travel trailer. Armed with trash bags, trash grabbers, the volunteers are assigned areas of the Town Beach to travel to and clean up, before meeting back at the Edisto Beach State Park for a free T-shirt and hot dog lunch.
The Edisto Beach Sweep falls under the larger umbrella of the Keep America Beautiful and Palmetto Pride organizations. Kelley Moore is the Executive Director of the Keep Edisto Beautiful organization, and works for the Town of Edisto. “We are an affiliate of the Keep S.C. Beautiful group, and we get grant money from Palmetto Pride in order to provide trash bags and trash grabbers for volunteers to have,” said Moore. “We partner with The Friends of Edisto State Park (FRESPACE) who provides free access to Shelter One for a picnic lunch and volunteers swap stories about what people find on the beach.”
When a volunteer arrives at the sign-up table at 9 a.m. they are assigned a specific portion of the beach to clean up. For example, Edisto Mayor Pro Tem Crawford Moore was assigned everything from Beach Access 13 to Beach Access 15.
“I picked up some beer cans, and some plastic food wrappers pretty consistently today,” said Moore. “Plastic bottle caps and smaller items tend to get blown by the wind up into the edge of the dunes and get hung up on the grass, so that is always a good place to check. But the actual parking lots at each access held the most litter, including plates left on the ground that appeared to be where pets were fed.”
Items found during the beach sweep include lip balm, a AA battery, rusty spent shotgun shell, a bar of soap, wooden parts from a dock, construction pipe, and an unopened six pack of Coors Light beer.
Ida Tipton used to coordinate the Edisto Beach Sweep, when schoolkids were a part of the overall plan. “… I feel strongly that we have to educate kids to pick up litter when they see it,” she said, adding that school children have not participated recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tipton also recalled the time that a Civil War artifact was recovered during an Edisto Beach sweep. “You just never know what’s out there on the beach,” she said.
