A: Hey, Mike, do you have any plans for the weekend?
B: Hi, Emily. My family and I are going to the beach on Saturday. How about you?
A: My family is planning on going to the beach too. We should meet up and scope out a nice spot for our families to relax and hang out together.
B: Oh, we’re not going to the beach to relax, we’re going as part of a beach clean-up.
A: A what?
B: We get together with a big group of people and spend a few hours picking up the trash on the beach.
A: Why do you do that?
B: For several reasons. So the garbage doesn’t wash out to sea and pollute the ocean, so that animals at the beach don’t eat trash by accident, and to keep the beach clean and beautiful for everyone to enjoy.
A: I get why you do it, but it doesn’t sound very fun.
B: That’s what I thought when we first started doing it, but it can actually be fun. Us kids usually make a game out of it, some of the adults join in as well.
A: What kind of game?
B: Sometimes we see who can collect the most trash or who finds the most interesting thing left on the beach.
A: Is there a lot of garbage at the beach?
B: Sometimes, there definitely was at first. Now that we’ve been doing it a while I think people have been making a better effort to clean up after themselves, which is really nice.
A: So you go to the beach and don’t swim?
B: Oh we swim, we just clean up for a few hours first. You should try it, it feels really good and the beach looks so clean.
A: I’ll ask my family. Would you guys mind if we join?
B: Absolutely not, the more the merrier. And we always swim and have a picnic with everyone at the beach afterward.
A: You guys clean up after yourselves, right?
B: Of course!