The numbers would be shocking if they weren’t so typical:
• 25,000 pieces of Styrofoam
• 70,000 pieces of plastic
• 42,000 cigarette butts
San Diego Coastkeeper and the Surfrider Foundation’s San Diego chapter announced the results of their 2010 beach cleanups Monday, and those were the most common finds by volunteers combing the sand last year.
Uncommon finds included a keyboard, a car window, a hot water heater, a bag of vomit and something that one poor volunteer simply described as “poop bag.”
The groups said volunteers found the least trash at Torrey Pines State Beach. Tourmaline Beach in Pacific Beach had the most. They found fewer cigarette butts than a year earlier (down from 48,000), but more Styrofoam (up from 12,000 pieces) and more plastic. Alicia Glassco, who manages Coastkeeper’s beach cleanups program, cautioned against reading too much into those trends, because the number of volunteers changes annually.
Coastkeeper and Surfrider weren’t the only groups patrolling San Diego County for litter last year. In all, 40,000 volunteers netted 635,000 pounds of garbage from area beaches and waterways, the environmental groups said in a press release. That includes cleanups run by Wildcoast, I Love a Clean San Diego and the San Diego River Park Foundation.
Here’s a list of cleanups scheduled in 2011.
Please contact Rob Davis directly at rob.davis@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0529 and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/robwdavis.