|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Nearly 40 years ago, the California Coastal Commission organized its inaugural statewide cleanup, an effort that drew close to 2,500 volunteers. Fast forward to 2024 and the 40th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day is expected to include more than 50,000 Californians, making it the country’s largest annual volunteer event. In 1993, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the “largest garbage collection” ever organized.
Since 1985, more than 1.7 million Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers have removed nearly 27 million pounds of trash from California’s waterways, according to Coastal Commission data. A push since the mid ’90s to expand the event inland has led to participation from every county in the state except Trinity County. Last year, 45,672 volunteers statewide collected 376,308 pounds of debris.
As the state marks Coastal Cleanup Day’s milestone anniversary this Saturday, Sept. 21, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are gearing up for cleanups of local beaches, creeks and shoreline areas, with several sites already at capacity for volunteers.
Organizers say that environmental stewardship on the local level has led to cleanups being held year-round, part of the reason behind a drop in average pounds of trash picked up by volunteers statewide from 18 pounds per person in 2004 to 8.2 pounds per person last year, according to California Coastal Commission Marine Debris Program Manager Eben Schwartz.
“From a cleanup standpoint, I’d say our coast is in much much better shape today than it was 40 years ago when we started this,” said Schwartz, the statewide director of Coastal Cleanup Day for the past 25 years.
Coastal Cleanup Day has helped habitats, inspired environmental stewardship and fostered community among volunteers over 40 years, but it’s also shaped policy. Data collected by volunteers each year details the amounts and types of trash they clean up, and those numbers are used to “reinforce throughout the year what they’ve done and help us come up with new solutions,” Schwartz said.
In the last decade alone, Schwartz said, California has made significant progress when it comes to addressing plastic pollution: A statewide plastic bag ban took effect in 2016, new regulations addressing trash in stormwater systems have been adopted, and more than 80 cities have bans on foam takeout containers. Before the 2016 ban, plastic bags were one of the most common items collected; by 2017, they no longer cracked the top 10 items list.
“A lot of these things came about because of data our volunteers collected,” he said. “It’s an incredibly useful tool to show lawmakers what the biggest problems are in our environment and to show them if the solutions they came up with are effective.”
‘We definitely get unusual items’
California’s first beach cleanups predate Coastal Cleanup Day. In 1979, Humboldt County resident Joe Abbott and his wife Ann Morrissey wrote a grant for what was initially called the Beach Beautification Project. With help from the Northcoast Environmental Center (NEC), the program removed over 34,000 pounds of trash from 110 miles of Humboldt County shoreline. Two years later, the NEC partnered with the Arcata Recycling Center to create the first Adopt-A-Beach program in California, according to the Coastal Commission.
In 1984, Oregon resident Judy Neilson organized the country’s first statewide beach cleanup, naming it the Plague of Plastics. California followed suit, and by 1986 The Ocean Conservancy ran its first coastal cleanup in Texas and began collaborating with the California Coastal Commission to organize cleanups nationally and later globally.
San Mateo County has participated in Coastal Cleanup Day for nearly 20 years, according to Connie Tran, a program lead for San Mateo County’s Pollution Prevention Program and the county’s Coastal Cleanup Day coordinator. This year, approximately 40 sites throughout the county are participating, a number that includes sites with private cleanups. Nearly 5,000 volunteers in the county last year picked up just shy of 30,000 pounds of trash, according to Coastal Commission data.
“We definitely get unusual items,” Tran said. “We’ve seen a wide selection of appliances like fridges, tires. People find miscellaneous I guess in a sense antique-ish toys, old dolls and mannequins, Magic 8 Balls, old sporting equipment.”
In San Mateo County, the number of Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers and the amount of trash picked up has grown: In 2005, 970 volunteers collected 14,600 pounds of trash, and in 2023, 4,146 people removed 27,000 pounds of debris.
Cigarette butts are still the most common culprit when it comes to littering, but microplastics are also common – everything from bottle caps and food containers to bits of plastic furniture. The type of trash collected has changed over the years, Tran said.
“Before the reusable bag ordinance, we used to find a lot of grocery bags,” she said. “During the height of the pandemic, there was a lot of littered PPE (personal protective equipment), a lot of disposable gloves and masks.”
Statewide, cigarettes are by far the most common debris picked up based on Coastal Commission data collected between 1988 and 2023, with food wrappers and containers, caps and lids, bags, and disposable platewire and cutlery rounding out the top five list.
While participation in Coastal Cleanup Day has grown, a lot less trash is being picked up statewide compared to pre-COVID numbers, Schwartz said. Before the pandemic, inland coordinators organized large cleanups with machinery to remove debris from dump sites along rivers. These cleanups have not come back since COVID hit, Schwartz said.
There are also more cleanup activities throughout the year, including private events with corporations, schools and community groups.
“With that increased cleaning up of the coast, we are seeing less trash on this one day of the year,” Schwartz said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s less trash out there, but it does mean we’re doing a better job of cleaning it up year-round.”
Peninsula pollution prevention
Participation in Coastal Cleanup Day has “blown up” since the early 2000s as the event expanded into the state’s inland areas, with 74,000 participants in 2019. When COVID hit in 2020, 16,000 Californians led self-guided cleanups in their neighborhoods since organized events couldn’t be held.
“Ever since that year, we’ve been slowly ramping up trying to get back to pre-COVID numbers,” Schwartz said.
The Coastal Commission surveys volunteers every year and has found that the top reason motivating people to participate is the impact plastic pollution has on marine life.
“Over 1.7 million people have participated in Coastal Cleanup Day,” Schwartz said. “This has built this enormous constituency, two generations of people now that want to see us do things differently. Because of the data collected we have new laws in the state, new regulations around trash. We are leading the world around laws and regulations around plastic pollution because the people of California have demanded it at least in part because of what Coastal Cleanup Day has taught them.”
Coastal Cleanup Day also helped inspire the formation of Pacific Beach Coalition, a Pacifica-based nonprofit that organizes regular cleanups, habitat restorations and educational initiatives around littering and the importance of preserving the coastal environment. In the ’90s, dumping at local beaches was a significant issue, and it was common to find construction waste dumped and lit on fire, according to Pacific Beach Coalition program coordinator Greg Finkelstein.
In 1997, Jim Fithian and his wife Ana Garcia began cleaning up Linda Mar State Beach, starting with an initial event for Coastal Cleanup Day. That evolved into a monthly cleanup, and as more people got involved the Pacific Beach Coalition took shape. The coalition now hosts monthly cleanups at 11 sites that extend beyond Pacifica into Foster City, Half Moon Bay, Daly City and Montara.
Finkelstein grew up in San Mateo and got involved with the Pacific Beach Coalition after hearing about it from a group he was working with on sea star population counts. His father, former San Mateo City Council member Jay Finkelstein, participated in Coastal Cleanup Day on the Bayside and brought Greg, renting an airboat and going into the mudflats around Foster City and San Mateo to pull out tires.
“It was such an impactful experience to me,” Greg Finkelstein said. “I definitely thought it was fun, but I also understood the experience that this was litter and it’s hard to remove.”
The coalition’s monthly cleanups normally draw 20-30 volunteers, with 50-100 typically joining the flagship cleanup at Linda Mar State Beach. Those numbers double or triple for marquee events like Earth Day or Coastal Cleanup Day. Cleanups net anywhere from 20 pounds of trash to over 100 pounds if large items are involved. Every year from mid-September through October, the coalition holds its Butt Blitz, an initiative focused on collecting discarded cigarette butts; they’re expected to hit a milestone of 2 million total cigarette butts cleaned up by October.
“What’s really interesting about cigarette butts is that with almost any other trash it could’ve been an accident it ended up there,” Finkelstein said. “With a cigarette butt, you can almost guarantee that someone made a conscious decision to litter.”
Pollution has wide-ranging impacts, from sea anemones and and whales consuming plastic to microplastics ending up in sand, water and humans. Plastics often break down into methane or volatile organic compounds and become greenhouse gases. And when a site is already trashed, it can make the problem grow, Finkelstein said.
“Trash begets trash. When you have an area that’s relatively clean, you might think twice about littering, but it’s a lot easier to do that action without thinking about it when that place looks like a dump,” he said.
Building environmental stewardship
Combating littering “starts with education,” says Tran, San Mateo County’s Pollution Prevention Program lead.
“Residents of San Mateo County are definitely more aware of the impact that trash and litter and hazardous materials has on the environment and the animals and people that live in it,” she said. “I think there’s always going to be pockets of people that may not be fully aware.”
Tran said the county tries to encourage its residents to reduce, reuse and recycle whenever possible. Other initiatives around pollution include a household hazardous waste program, a used oil and filter recycling program and a cigarette butt litter reduction program.
Pacific Beach Coalition works to educate local residents about protecting the coastal environment through its annual Earth Honoree of the Year. Coalition volunteers use the honoree, an endangered plant or animal, to educate adults and kids about the creature and how it can be better protected if humans change their habits. Whales are this year’s honoree.
The coalition also provides teacher toolkits and hosts assemblies at schools to educate children on the marine ecosystem and dangers of marine debris. Last year, Finkelstein spoke to roughly 5,000 students at 25 assemblies throughout Pacifica and in neighboring cities.
“It’s been so amazing to see a real impact,” he said. “It’s very hard not to feel like a cog in a machine these days…but to know you’re going out and doing stuff that’s genuinely informing the community and getting them to think firsthand of their actions, it’s been a very inspiring thing.”
While Schwartz believes that cleanups will “always be a vital tool in the toolbox,” he said there are a lot of people in the environmental community who “recognize the need to move past cleanups to true solutions at the source,” including new laws and regulations. At the same time, the data gathered by Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers has proven essential in helping inform policymakers about the impacts of pollution.
“It’s a huge impact that people have in a very short amount of time, and the impact is felt throughout the years,” Schwartz said.
Finkelstein said that he hopes people recognize that protecting the environment is a “year-round issue,” not just something to pay attention to on Coastal Cleanup Day.
“Think about it when you’re voting on policies and just remember this is a pervasive issue and it’s not enough to just have one or two days a year where we’re focusing on this,” he said.
California Coastal Cleanup Day
When: 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Sept. 21
Where: Throughout California, including San Mateo and Santa Clara counties
What to bring: Sunscreen, a hat, closed toe shoes, a water bottle, a bucket and reusable gloves
How to participate:
-Visit coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/ccd.html for a statewide map of participating Coastal Cleanup Day sites, historic info and more.
-Visit tinyurl.com/sanmateocountycleanups for San Mateo County Coastal Cleanup Day site information and registration info.
-Go to cleanacreek.org/upcoming-events for Santa Clara County site information and registration info,
-Pacific Beach Coalition will host cleanups at several sites and a Coastal Cleanup Day beach party on Saturday, Sept. 21, at Linda Mar State Beach. Go to pacificbeachcoalition.org to learn more about the organization’s cleanups, habitat restoration efforts and educational resources.
