Grandmother-grandson duo remove trash from beach after July 4th: ‘Something to help’

By CNN Newsource

Published July 7, 2025 10:58 AM

By WTVR CBS 6 Web Staff

NORFOLK, Virginia (WTVR) — National Clean Beach Week comes at the perfect time after Independence Day festivities left Virginia beaches littered with trash.

The day after the Fourth of July, instead of sleeping in or lounging by the pool, community members stepped up to clean Ocean View beaches in Norfolk, WTKR reported.

After the fireworks concluded, there was significant cleaning to do on the beaches of Hampton Roads. Volunteers found everything from water bottles to watermelon remains scattered across the sand.

National Clean Beach Week is an annual campaign that aims to preserve the beauty of beaches. On Saturday, the Norfolk Park Rangers and the organization Keep Norfolk Beautiful tidied up Community Beach Park in Ocean View.

“The trash cans are overflowing, everything is blowing down the beaches into the water,” one volunteer noted.

Sarah Sterzing, the organizer, said the clean-up process started early Saturday morning with the Department of Waste Management in Norfolk taking the lead on the litter.

“They’ve probably picked up close to 1000 lbs of trash off the beaches before we got here, but yea we’ve picked up a couple hundred ourselves since we’ve been here,” Sterzing said.

Grandmother and grandson duo Lilian Peterson and Jonathan Lindsay collected a significant amount during their clean-up effort.

“Packaging plastic we found we found some bottles, bottle caps and we saw a lot of smaller fireworks, too,” Jonathan said.

Lindsay explained that even a few pieces of litter could have negative impacts on people and the overall ecosystem.

“People could step on stuff, small animals could eat them and choke — a lot of this stuff could end up in the ocean, too, though,” he said.

While cleaning up the community, the pair made memories one bottle cap at a time.

“I think it’s nice having something to do, being out here doing something to help, especially alongside my grandmother,” Jonathan said.

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