Surfrider cleanup draws hundreds to coast
Volunteers clear trash from beach at annual event
Earth Day may have been Saturday, but that didn’t stop volunteers from showing up at Ocean Beach on Sunday morning to participate in the Surfrider Foundation’s annual Earth Day beach cleanup.
Three stations along Ocean Beach — at Stairwell 17, Noriega Street and Sloat Boulevard — welcomed a total of about 250 volunteers on Sunday morning. The Outer Sunset day was bright, sunny and brutally windy. Surfrider, a nonprofit group devoted to coastal defense, provided gloves, trash pickers and buckets, and volunteers set out to collect as much debris as they could find on the shores. Afterward, Surfrider hosted a block party on 45th Avenue with live music, barbecue and beers poured by local breweries Woods and Calicraft.
Each year, Earth Day helps Surfrider shout its message a little louder, but organizing beach cleanups is business as usual for the organization, which holds three cleanup days every month.
Though many San Franciscans may not realize it, pollution and waste throughout the entire city have big impacts on the water quality of the coastline. For example, trash thrown into the bay on the city’s eastern side gets flushed by currents through the Golden Gate, where eddies throw the debris into the ocean. “Every time we have a cleanup, we collect at least 40 to 50 pounds of trash,” said Max
Ernst, chairman of Surfrider’s San Francisco chapter.
Surfrider was founded in 1984 in Malibu, when a group of surfers formed a coalition to protest development plans along the beach where they surfed. The foundation now counts 80 chapters nationwide, focusing on grassroots organizing; the San Francisco chapter has about 50 active volunteers, and a larger network of 2,500 in the city.
“It’s easy in San Francisco to be disconnected from the beach, because we don’t usually get that ‘Let’s go hang out at the beach all day’ weather,” Ernst said. Many of Surfrider’s programs here are dedicated to preempting the cycle of waste that leads to beach pollution: campaigns against single-use plastic, for example, and efforts to put cigarette ash cans around the city, so that those materials later don’t end up in the ocean.
“The goal is to educate,” Ernst said, “which hopefully mitigates the problem on the front end.” In addition to pollution, another big focus for Surfrider is coastal erosion, and it is trying to push local government to implement a managed retreat solution.
Many volunteers Sunday morning had dogs in tow; even more had their children. At the Stairwell 17 station, across from the Beach Chalet restaurant, corporate and school groups came in droves. Last week, LinkedIn and Salesforce both sponsored employee-led cleanups through Surfrider.
As volunteers returned to the stations, their buckets teeming with garbage, some seemed surprised at the scale of waste they’d encountered. They’d found cardboard boxes, pillows and blankets, sixpacks of beer, huge slabs of wood.
“It’s hard to see the pollution at Ocean Beach all the time, because the water moves so much here,” Ernst said.
And most beachgoers don’t realize that Ocean Beach is a national park, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, just like Muir Woods and Lands End. “If everyone knew they were entering a national park,” Ernst said, “they might treat it differently.”
Surfrider hopes its efforts help make that status more visible. “When people see you coming by to pick up trash, maybe they think twice about leaving it on the beach,” said David Martinez, one of Surfrider’s active year-round volunteers.
Ocean pollution affects all of San Francisco in myriad ways — by contaminating the fish that we eat, for instance — but, of course, the surfers who flock to Ocean Beach’s swelling waters experience it up close and personal every day. That intimate relationship with the ocean is at the heart of why Surfrider volunteers do what they do. “You don’t have to be a surfer to be involved,” Ernst said. “But it just so happens that surfers usually share the sense of responsibility. By being on the ground, you’re able to see what issues affect the local community.”