The Beach is not an Ashtray

A week ago while touring around Pacifica with City Council Members and Members of the Pacifica Beach Coalition I was inspired by thousands of volunteers cleaning litter from roadways, removing piles of invasive plants and cleaning beaches.  Community members rallied as part of the Earth Day clean up and celebration, and beaches already remarkably clean thanks to routine beach clean ups, sparkled.  In honor of my favorite ocean icon, the theme was Take a Bite Out of Litter.

Trash ranged from the random to the bizarre including a blow up jumpy tent made of vinyl. Among the most common item cleaned on the streets and beaches were cigarette butts.  Piles of them.

A few days after the event a community member remarked that the area near the skate park looked as if the clean up had never happened. Trash and cigarette butts littered the ground around the ramps as skaters kick flipped and sick- tricked one of the coolest community skate parks I’ve seen.

Many of these skaters also surf or at least skate the sidewalks along the beach, and would likely never consider flicking a butt onto the sand.  But upstream, outside restaurants and bars, in parking lots smokers take the last drag and flick their butts into the gutter.  Most cigarette butts go from the streets into the storm drain and straight out into the ocean.

Cigarette butt waste is the new ocean killer

• Consider these facts:
• An estimated 4.95 trillion cigarette butts are disposed of in our environment annually worldwide.
• Litter clean up costs the U.S. over 11 billion annually, cigarette butts represent an estimated 32% of that litter.
• Cigarette butts are composed of cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable plastic, which can take up to 25 years to decompose.
• Cigarette butts leach toxins when wet, posing a threat to marine life.
• Already threatened marine creatures like the Albatross, sea turtles and sharks eat this toxic laden plastic, placing them another rung down on the descent towards extinction.

Hold On to Your Butts

Thanks to efforts from the Beach Coalition and passionate community members, Pacifica is the first community in Northern California to establish a smoke free beach at Linda Mar.  Signs are posted along the strand and by friendly reminders there appears to be less cigarettes in the sand.  Butt- the education has to reach upstream where the butts are running to the sea. 

Skaters for Sharks?

Cleaning the beach is great, but we need to stop it at the source. Surfers and skate rats can lead the charge to keep our ocean and beaches butt-free but we need community engagement and reinforcement.

Following the lead of Pacifica and So Cal Surfrider Foundation - who has banned smoking on 30 Southern California beaches -we aim to reduce this impact on our marine wildlife in the Bay and coastal San Francisco.  We are looking for leaders in our communities from the skate ramp to the San Francisco estuary to Hold Onto Your Butts and keep our ocean healthy. 

The Hold On To Your Butt campaign aims to raise awareness about the environmental impact of cigarette butt litter on our oceans, waves and beaches, and to help eliminate cigarette butt litter in Marin County and beyond to the Bay and Pacific Ocean.  

About the Author

Like sharks? David McGuire is a marine biologist, ocean filmmaker and shark conservationist. He is the director of the non profit Sea Stewards advocating ocean health through education, research and policy. Still an active surfer he has been known to Ollie a rail and has a pair of schralped Vans somewhere in his closet.  More can be learned here.