Dear Mayor Cahill,

During your State of the City Address in March, you mentioned you want to help "Beverly evolve into a sustainable, 21-century city." We the undersigned are petitioning that you help us take care of our beaches and our beloved oceans, and all the living beings dependent on it, by placing several visible trash cans on Dane St. and Lynch Park Beaches, thus making sure that people throw away their trash instead of littering our beaches and oceans.

Every day we see Beverly residents picking up plastic bottles, cans, toys, dog poop bags, etc., from Dane Street and Lynch Park Beaches. We've seen parents, the elderly, boyscots, and even tourists picking up trash, but there is just not enough of us to keep up with the hundreds of visitors each week. The pictures above are from just two separate days of one family picking up trash.

What we manage to pick up is just a small percentage of the trash that ends up in our oceans. This litter travels to the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, which has over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer. Beverly is contributing daily to this pollution. And it is something that could be easily solved with trash cans and signs urging people to help us keep our Oceans clean.

Littering the ocean does not only affect the environment, mismanaged trash impacts the overall health of communities and beach goers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency: "Peristent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) substances are chemical compounds that are resistant to degradation (breaking down), are highly mobile in the environment and exhibit a high degree of toxicity."

People are responsible for not littering but trash management and providing enouch trash and recycling receptacles are the responsibility of local governments.

Mayor Cahill, help us bring back enough trash cans and sentry dog waste stations to our beaches so we can become the sustainable community we want to be.

Thank you!