HOW CAN YOU HELP IN YOUR COMMUNITY?

HOME & GARDEN
Properly use and store all hazardous household products, including cleaners, solvents and paints. Be an environmentally aware consumer. Buy nontoxic products for use in your home and garden whenever possible.

Use pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers carefully and sparingly.

Conserve water and reduce the amount of runoff by not over-watering your lawn and garden.

Use a broom rather than a hose to clean up garden clippings, dirt and litter from sidewalks, patios and driveways.

Compost yard trimmings and leaves. Do not sweep them into the streets or catch basins.

Divert rain spouts and other sources of runoff onto grass or vegetation.

Dispose of pet waste in trash cans. Leaving it on the lawn sends harmful bacteria into the storm drains whenever you water or when it rains.

Donate unwanted paint, fertilizer, etc. to friends or community organizations.

AUTOMOTIVE
When changing car fluids, use a drip pan to collect any spills. If a spill occurs, soak it up using an absorbent material such as kitty litter or sawdust and dispose of it properly.

Wash your car with biodegradable soap using as little water as possible. Shut off the hose while washing your car and then rinse.

Keep a trash bag in the car and use it! Do not throw anything out the window.

Keep up car maintenance to reduce leakage of oil, antifreeze and other fluids.

Buy batteries, anti-freeze and motor oil from stores that will recycle used products, or take these items to a local Household Hazardous Waste roundup.

HOW DOES THIS HELP?
Water running off your yard, sidewalk or street flows down gutters to curb side openings called catch basins. From there, this urban runoff flows into the storm drain system, a vast network of underground pipes and channels that eventually discharge into the ocean.

Anything carried by this runoff — pesticides, pet waste, oil and anti-freeze from leaky cars and trucks, foam containers and plastic bags — ends up trashing the beaches, polluting the ocean, and harming wildlife... And humans. This contaminated flow is the reason some of our most scenic beaches are closed to the public after a heavy rainstorm.

Unlike the wastewater from inside homes and businesses that flows to sewers and treatment plants, outside runoff water flows to the ocean untreated. That's because the storm drain system was designed to prevent flooding during heavy rains by quickly diverting billions of gallons of rainwater to the ocean. The open portions of this system are called flood control channels.

Even during the driest day in Southern California, we produce tens of millions of gallons of runoff, the result of activities such as car washing, lawn watering and yard cleanup.

For our own protection, and for a cleaner ocean, we need to keep trash off the streets, out of catch basins, and runoff water free from pollutants.

Just one quart of used motor oil dumped into a catch basin can pollute 250,000 gallons of ocean water! Depending upon their composition, products take different lengths of time to break down (biodegrade) in the environment. Here are average times for these products.

* Every year, over 40 tons of trash washes up on our beaches. * Approximately 80% of that could have been recycled. * An average of 870,000 cigarette butts are thrown in the street every month in Los Angeles. These eventually reach the ocean through the storm drains.

According the University of British Columbia, here is a short summary of commonly used items and how long it takes for them to biodegrade when they are scattered about as litter

Item	Length of time
Styrofoam	lasts 400+ years
Cotton rags	1-5 months
Paper	2-5 months
Rope	3-14 months
Orange peels	6+ months due to the antibacterial mold that develops
Wool socks	1-5 yrs
Cigarette butts	1-12 yrs
Plastic coated paper milk cartons	5 yrs
Plastic bags	10-20 yrs
Leather shoes	25-40 yrs or more
Nylon fabric	30-40 yrs
Tin cans	50-100 yrs and then we get toxic tin into the environment!
Aluminum cans	80-100 yrs and then we get toxic aluminum into the environment!
Plastic 6-pack holder rings	450 yrs and, of course, how many birds have died by suffocating after getting caught in these rings in the meantime?
Glass bottles	1 million yrs
Plastic bottles	Forever