Founded in the spring of 2024 by Junior Brandon Teh, Sea Garbage is a group of Garfield students that collects garbage around the city and posts it to the instagram account @theseagarbage. Teh said that he “started Sea Garbage last year in the springtime” after being inspired when walking by Washington Middle School. He noticed piles of trash on the school grounds and thought “when is anyone going to clean this up?”

Initially Teh went to pick up trash alone but after his friends expressed interest he began organizing groups to participate in pickups. “We’ve got to take care of the environment,” he stated. “It’s going to be harder to reverse the damage the longer we wait,” Teh explained, his goals for Sea Garbage are to make a positive impact on the environment by cleaning up neglected areas and increasing awareness of environmental problems by “bringing people together to help out,” Teh said. 

Teh and his friends picked up 100 bags last summer. “Right now our goal is 200 but our bigger goal is to get to 1000 bags sometime in the future,” he explained. Washington Middle School and the Mount Baker area are two locations that the group has focused on due to the high amount of garbage. Seattle Public Utilities’ customer center offers free trash bags and “if we pick up more than two bags we can leave them on the street and they’ll come and pick it up within a day,” Teh explained.

Sea Garbage has received a substantial amount of community engagement from their instagram account. “I’ve gotten a lot of support from the videos I posted,” Teh shared, “Seattle Public Utilities even commented on one of our posts.” Sea Garbage has also gotten a lot of support from the Garfield community and even people from other schools. “One time I was walking and someone yelled ‘is that Sea Garbage?!’” Teh expressed how it is cool to see how many people his videos are reaching. “People ask me to participate too and I really appreciate that,” he added. 

The instagram account for Sea Garbage has many videos featuring content of Teh and his friends picking up garbage. “The reason we film is to bring awareness to the situation,” Teh shared. He explained how he used to live in Indonesia where trash is piled up in the rivers and streets. “Seattle is not as bad as other places in the country and the world but there are still areas of the city that have lots of trash,” Teh said. He explained how Sea Garbage has helped him make new connections, improve communication and set up meetings. “A bunch of people have commented asking us to go to other schools,” Teh mentioned. Sea Garbage is planning to do a community pickup with Garfield’s Green Team in the future as well. “It’s cool to see how many people we’ve reached,” Teh said. “It encourages us to keep going.”