The biggest beach visitation day in America is also the most littered
Known as the Earth Day for beaches, Clean Beaches Week devotes an entire seven days to celebrating the importance of clean and safe coastlines.
For many people the Fourth of July isn't complete without a day lying out on the beach, the sound of the ocean lapping against the shore, the feeling of sandy cigarette butts between your toes...
The Clean Beaches Coalition (CBC) calls Independence Day "the biggest beach visitation day in America – and the most littered."
National Clean Beaches Week extends from July 1 to July 7, spanning the July Fourth holiday, and was founded in 2003, with CBC acting as the lead organization behind this awareness week. In 2007, however, both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives passed resolutions enacting the week, according to the CBC.
According to the Ocean Conservancy's most recent ocean trash index, cigarette butts are the most common items collected in beach cleanups at about 2.4 million collected internationally in 2017.
Founder of Cigarette Pollution Solutions Ken Beckstead has sought to cut the problem off at the source.
"Those cigarette butts aren't from people on the beach. Those people are upstream, the ones that are throwing the cigarette butts that are going down our storm drain systems," Beckstead said.
In a preventative step to keep people from littering cigarette butts, which would in turn get washed into storm drain systems, he set up a few receptacles at the San José Airport. The receptacles are plain and unassuming – a few orange bins and a large yellow 55-gallon barrel, but in just three months they can collect around 381,000 cigarette butts.
Ken Beckstead set up a few receptacles near the Golden Gate Bridge to collect cigarette butts to turn into energy. In this effort he hopes to divert the amount of cigarette waste that finds its way into the storm drains and turn them into power. (Cigarette Pollution Solutions/Ken Beckstead)
The Ocean Conservancy lists California as the U.S. state with the most items collected from beach cleanups and the state with the most cigarette butts found on beach cleanups.
The Cigarette Pollution Solutions sends the cigarette waste to Convanta, where the waste is turned into energy for the Butts to Watts program. The 381,000 cigarette butts collected have the potential to create about a megawatt of power, according to Beckstead.
"In 1998 alone with threw away 170 million pounds of cigarette butts," Beckstead said. "That would have powered 8,900 American homes 24 hours a day for an entire year. So that’s how much energy we’re throwing away cigarette butt by cigarette butt every day in America."
The Butts to Watts program collected about 381,000 cigarette Butts over a time span of three months, potentially amounting to over a megawatt of energy when recycled. (Cigarette Pollution Solutions/Ken Beckstead)
According to Beckstead, the littered cigarette butts that are washed down the storm drains are the ones that end up on the beach most of the time.
"When you get down to the waterline, all those cigarette butts are actually coming out of our storm drain systems much like the microplastics that are going all over the ocean," Beckstead said. "Cigarette butts are doing the same thing, and they’re sort of light and float, so they just get washed back up on the beach."
Cigarette Pollution Solutions has worked with the Orange County Coastkeeper and foundations such as the Surfrider Foundation and I Love a Clean San Diego to help clean up beaches.
Bags of litter sit in a pile on Flagler Beach in Florida after 4th of July celebrations. (Instagram photo/@unitedcoastalalliance)
Under cigarette butts and food wrappers, plastic bottles and caps fall within the top five items picked up. Strangely enough, plastic straws and stirrers come in at number seven.
The Coca-Cola Company helped the Ocean Conservancy launch the Trash Free Seas Alliance in 2011, according to the soda company.
The Ocean Conservancy has reported a few strange items littered along beaches across the world, such as a full size car in Finland, seven sleds in Canada and two clown wigs in the United States.
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