Close to 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 clean-up sites throughout San Diego County on July 5.
Surfrider sponsored the clean-up effort, called “the Morning After Mess,” for its fourth year as a way to clean up the garbage left on San Diego’s beaches following the Fourth of July festivities.
Volunteers from San Diego Coastkeeper, I Love a Clean San Diego, and Keep Del Mar Clean organized beach clean-ups at the Ocean Beach Pier, Belmont Park, Pacific Beach Drive, Tourmaline, 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 beach-goers included cans, six- and twelve-pack plastic drink holders, Styrofoam coolers and sun-umbrellas, according to Ken David, a member of Surfrider’s San Diego executive committee.
Among these non-biodegradable items, David, who volunteered at the Pacific Beach Drive cleanup, said it was disheartening to see, “a couch and at least two glass bottles; one of them said tequila and the other rum.”
When the Pacific Beach clean-up team surveyed the site on 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 lbs, the largest total of any individual clean-up site in the county. David also estimated that 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 attributes 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 week of July 4.
In response to the influx of holiday beach traffic, FreePB.Org, 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 on 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 long-time 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.”
FreePB.Org’s sturdy cardboard bins can hold 10 times more trash than the city’s 55-gallon trash barrels.
“It would be easy to say something about enforcing litter laws [to solve the litter problem], 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.”