Like me, you might have celebrated Independence Day outdoors, with your friends and family. Here at Surfrider, we obviously love the beach, and that’s where we usually go — and we are not alone. Our beaches are a favorite destination for millions of Americans every Independence Day.
Unfortunately, all of this revelry comes with an environmental cost, which is why the Fifth of July has come to be known as the Dirtiest Beach Day of the Year.
If you haven’t already, please follow these tips for your next beach holiday to minimize your impact.
Luckily for our coasts and ocean, Surfrider Foundation activists across the country are ready and come out in droves to pick up the trash left behind every year. This time, 30 different Surfrider chapters in 13 states hosted 50 cleanup events! These efforts ranged from large group events to solo cleanups.
So far, over the holiday weekend, 2,000 volunteers cleaned up 10,000 pounds of trash and recycling from our beaches — and the numbers are still coming in.
While we’re still compiling the data from our weekend-long cleanups, we’ve already noticed some less-than-festive trashy trends from our cleanup data. The top items found during Dirtiest Beach Day cleanups were fireworks, cigarette butts, plastic fragments, and tons of plastic foodware, including takeout containers, food wrappers, plastic bottles and caps, and straws.
This data shows us that plastic on our beaches continues to be a huge problem and that there is much more that we need to do, especially during holidays and peak seasons. The solution? A combination of better public awareness, consumer choices, and policies at the local and state levels to reduce the amount of single-use plastic items produced in the first place.
We want to give a huge shout-out to everyone who showed up for our beaches this weekend to clean up the trash left behind after the holiday celebrations.
If you have not yet supported Surfrider’s work to keep our coasts and ocean plastic-free, please consider joining us as a member today. Thank you for keeping our coasts clean and for being a friend of the ocean.
Thanks to our Better Beach Alliance Partners, REEF and Costa for their continued support.