By Alison Schlick
The San Diego County Bar Association’s Animal Law Section and Environmental Law/Land Use Section teamed up with I Love a Clean San Diego to clean De Anza Cove in Mission Bay Park from the “trash fence” to the water, finding and disposing of more than 64 pounds of trash including recycling which was recycled.
Site Captain, Feroza Ardeshir, from USCD, and Lori Mendez from the Animal Law Section were the leaders spearheading this event which was in celebration of the 40th Annual Coastal Clean Up day, traditionally held in September after the crowded summer days turn breezy in the fall. Attendees for the event included our SDCBA members who learned about the event from our registration page as well as members of the public who signed up directly with ILACSD.
Attendees who signed up for the event through the ILACSD event portal for the 40th Annual Coastal CleanUp day included staff and students from UCSD! To learn more about I Love go to: https://www.cleansd.org
Co-captains Shawn Huston and Alison Schlick helped ILACSD Site Captain, Feroza Ardeshir to welcome members of the public who had signed up for the clean up on the nonprofit organization’s portal and geared up the volunteers with SDCBA supplied buckets and “grabbers” giving them a safety talk and a donut or two and welcoming them back to tally up and weigh their buckets of debris. The clean up buckets were donated by DIXIELINE a few years back to the bar association for our yearly clean ups. (www.dixieline.com)
When you do a clean up with the support and guidance of I Love a Clean San Diego, they outfit site captains with a bright orange shirt, a whole host of informational materials, including participant surveys, which help to categorize and study what litter is prevalent in an area, as well as to mark and tag hazardous items for pick up by City Park and Rec Staff or other governmental agencies. Such hazardous things as sharps, bio-waste, dead animals, etc. because such waste requires professional handling. But as far as simply tallying the plastic bottle caps, metal soda/beer tabs and caps, snack wrappers, glass pieces, etc. our volunteers and participants broke into teams of two and spread across the one mile by one mile approximate area of the De Anza Cove park and picked it clean and beautiful!
Several volunteer teams took to the debris collection survey with gusto! The survey is provided with all ILACSD clean ups. The USCD students especially were adept at segregating the cigarette butts (and counting each one on their tally!), which by the end of the clean up added up with the rest collected at a whopping 369 butts. Did you know that TERRACYCLE collects and recycles cigarette butts? How do they do this and how did we do this on our clean up day? Through Terracycle’s free regulated waste program specifically for this high frequency littered item. You can learn more here: https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/cigarette-waste-recycling?srsltid=AfmBOopo_rPJcTmbmP4YaVKc_-JQnJ2u0j5yHUuHw9X0_MkuXZ79Bj22
The critical issue of toxicity of cigarette butts to fish, was investigated over a decade ago, by researchers right here in San Diego. Of course prior scholarship on this topic was overarchingly focused on the hazardous carcinogenic properties of the “most common form of litter in the world” and it’s effects on the environment and humans coming into contact with it, more generally. If you would like to look into this issue further, one study to check out was, as previously mentioned conducted by researchers right here in our backyard of San Diego from the excellent minds at San Diego State University. Toxicity of cigarette butts, and their chemical components, to marine and freshwater fish, Slaughter E, Gersberg RM, Watanabe K, et al. Tobacco Control 2011;20:i25-i29. Available at the National Institutues of Health website: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3088407/ last accessed September 29, 2024.