An estimated 1,000 volunteers from the Surfrider Foundation’s San Diego chapter and several other local environmental groups collected more than 9,000 pounds of trash at seven cleanup sites throughout San Diego County on July 5. Surfrider sponsored the cleanup effort, called “The Morning After Mess,” which is now in its fourth year.
The cleanup drive was created in response to the amount of trash left on San Diego beaches during the Fourth of July holiday period.
Volunteers from San Diego CoastKeeper, I Love a Clean San Diego, and Keep Del Mar Clean organized beach cleanups at the Ocean Beach Pier, Belmont Park, Pacific Beach Drive, Tourmaline Surfing Park, 15th Street and Del Mar, Ponto and the South Oceanside Jetty.
Surfrider also reported that volunteers picked up more than 20,000 cigarette butts. Other common trash items left behind by holiday beachgoers included cans, six-pack and 12-pack plastic drink holders, Styrofoam coolers and sun umbrellas, according to Ken David, a member of the Surfrider San Diego executive committee.
Among the non-biodegradable items, David said, “I saw a couch and at least two glass bottles ” one of them said tequila and the other rum “¦ this was kind of disheartening.”
When the PB cleanup team surveyed the site July 5, David said that the beach appeared cleaner than in past years. However, the trash collected at Pacific Beach weighed more than 4,000 pounds, the largest total of any individual cleanup site in San Diego County. David also estimated the total amount of trash collected by Surfrider teams throughout San Diego County weighed close to 1,000 pounds more than last year.
In addition, cleanup teams at Ocean Beach collected 893 pounds of trash, according to Bill Hickman, the San Diego County chapter coordinator for Surfrider.
David attributed the larger totals to the more widespread use of sunshades, which weigh more than other items, and the record number of visitors to San Diego’s beaches during the heat-wave week of July 4.
In response to the influx of holiday beach traffic, Freepb.org, a nonprofit advocacy group that has placed trash bins in Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach and Mission Beach during the Fourth of July weekend for the past three years, increased the number of trash bins on the beaches by 250 beginning the Saturday prior to the Fourth of July, according to Jacob Pyle, business director of Freepb.org.
“This is an effort to help reduce the amount of trash on the beach on the Fourth of July and on other major holidays,” Pyle said. “As longtime residents of Ocean Beach and Mission Beach and Pacific Beach, we noticed that it wasn’t that people didn’t want to throw away their trash or wouldn’t throw away trash but that there was a lack of capacity to do that.”
The trash bins that Freepb.org placed on the beaches this year hold ten times the amount of trash as standard 55-gallon barrels, according to Freepb.org.
To encourage beachgoers not to litter, Freepb.org also organized volunteers to sweep Pacific Beach picking up trash and offering trash bags to the public. Pyle said that Freepb.org also advertised San Diego beach rules in local magazines to educate San Diego residents, and the group plans to work with the City of San Diego to post more signs listing the beach rules in Pacific and Ocean Beach in the future.
“If you go to, say, La Jolla Shores, every 25 feet there’s a sign on a 12-foot-high signpost “¦ each with a different beach rule on it. In contrast, you go down to the beaches here and there’s one sign that lists ten beach rules, and you can hardly see it,” Pyle said. “Making people aware of the rules as they approach the beach makes the police officers’ job easier and keeps the beaches nicer, because in general people want to do the right thing.”
David also suggested that public awareness might decrease beach litter.
“It would be easy to say something about enforcing litter laws, but “¦ the police have a whole lot of other things to do [on July Fourth], especially at around 9:30 p.m. when people are leaving the beaches,” he said.