GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY AND VOLUNTEER
Volunteers are still needed to help clean beaches, creeks and the San Francisco Bay shoreline
Tired of seeing litter at the beach? Not happy with that trash along the banks of your local creek? Worried that plastic pollution in the ocean is hurting wildlife?
This Saturday, there’s something you can do about it. From 9 a.m. to noon, the California Coastal Commission is
hosting the 34th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day — the state’s largest annual volunteer event. And with sunny skies forecast, organizers say more hands are still needed.
“We make a huge difference in three hours,” said Eben Schwartz, marine debris program manager at the California Coastal Commission. “It’s a great opportunity for folks to give back, and to have some
fun while they are out there.”
To sign up, go to www. coastalcleanupday.org or call 800-COAST-4U.
Last year, 66,535 people turned out in 55 of California’s 58 counties and collected 839,632 pounds of debris from beaches, rivers, creeks, lakes and bays. Of that, 42,938 pounds was recycled. The overall total was 8 percent more than the previous year,
but still well below the record of 1.3 million pounds collected in 2014.
Every year, volunteers — who come from community groups, scout troops, corporate volunteer programs and families — find some odd things among the trash. Last year, volunteers in Contra Costa County found a severed house arrest bracelet — minus
the criminal who was supposed to wear it. In Ventura County, they found a five-foot-tall inflatable Spiderman. There was a dead mouse in a beer bottle in Napa County. And in San Joaquin County, a stuffed teddy bear with a plant growing out of it.
Although California’s population and economy changes, the most common items found are largely the same every year.
From 1988 to 2016, that would be a cigarette butt — more than 7.3 million of them statewide, and 36 percent of all the items collected. Second were food wrappers and containers, at 10 percent, and third were caps and lids, at 8 percent. Paper and plastic bags, cups, plates and utensils, straws and glass bottles were also commonly found.
Hoping to cut down on cigarette litter, state lawmakers last month sent two bills to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that would ban smoking on all beaches and in state parks. The bills, SB 835 and SB 836, would impose a fine of $25 for violators. Last year, Brown vetoed similar bills that had higher fines, saying they went too far.
“If people can’t even smoke on a deserted beach, where can they?” Brown wrote in a veto message last September. “There must be some limit to the coercive power of government.”
Smoking already is banned by many cities and counties on beaches, including in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Francisco, San Mateo County and Los Angeles.
The state lawmaker who wrote the two bills now on Brown’s desk, state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, said the issue is about pollution, and its effects on the environment and the public.
“This is not about a single person puffing at a remote beach location and taking their tobacco trash home with them,” Glazer said Tuesday. “This is about hundreds of millions of cigarette butts killing sea life. When you find more butts on a beach than sea shells, we have pollution problem of major significance.” Brown signed a law in 2014 banning plastic grocery bags in an attempt to reduce litter and ocean pollution. That law that was put on the state ballot two years later by the plastic bag industry but upheld by voters. Since then, the number of plastic bags found during the Coastal Cleanup Day has fallen by 77 percent.
“There’s been a huge drop, a very steady downward trend,” said Schwartz.
Much of California’s beach debris doesn’t originate there. People drop or throw trash on the street, and it washes or blows into storm drains, which flow into creeks and eventually empty into the ocean. The debris, particularly plastic, not only makes the state’s beach look messy, but it also can kill wildlife, like birds and sea turtles, which become entangled, or eat it.
“If we didn’t have these cleanup events, we would have piles and piles of trash, all along our beaches,” said Schwartz. “Cities would have to spend millions of dollars to pay people to keep beaches clean, and we’d have a much more polluted ocean.”