Or… ask any Shore Drive resident what they love about their home, and our area’s natural beauty will most certainly be at the top of the list.

Sabrina of Ocean Park allowed us to post her words, unedited, below:

Today, I found four discarded fluorescent tubes in one of the beach garbage cans, which says to me that someone didn’t feel like taking them to a landfill (or Home Depot or Lowes) where they could be disposed of properly, but instead carried them out on to the beach to leave them for a crew which is unlikely to be equipped for hazardous waste. It also means they didn’t care if the bulbs got broken, thus allowing the [fluorescence’s] mercury lining to leak onto the sand and wash into the Chesapeake.

The garbage that we allow onto our land and into our waterways is not just ugly, it is deadly. Plastic bags, balloons, and shiny wrappers are a significant choking hazard for marine animals such as dolphins and sea turtles. Ocean birds starve to death every day with stomachs full of undigestible, brightly colored plastic that has built up over time; birds cannot pass this through their systems and ultimately have no room to swallow anything that has nutrition.

Ask an Ocean Park resident what they love about their home, and our area’s natural beauty will be at the top of the list. Perhaps we who purport to appreciate our surroundings could take responsibility for our own waste– and maybe even pick up something that was left behind by someone else.

Sabrina originally wrote this in Ocean Park’s Facebook Group yesterday.
Thank you Sabrina.

Photo taken in your unknown backyard, Pleasure House Point.