Though the festivities of Independence Day are now in the rearview, Santa Monica’s beaches are still littered with remnants of the holiday, and not in a positive way.
July 5 is often called the most dirty day of the year on public beaches, with Santa Monica being no different. Independence Day follows other summer holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day in being particularly nasty with plastic wrappers and other debris, a combination of sheer tourism amounts and the attitude of those trekking the beaches.
"I think that day when you see visitorship quadruple, it can be very overwhelming," said Heal the Bay Senior Director of Community Outreach & Connection, Meredith McCarthy. "I think people are coming from all over the state, the region, the country to visit the beach, people who aren’t as devoted to the care and welfare of our beaches. The mentality is, oh, this is somebody’s job to pick up this stuff after I visit the beach."
McCarthy stressed that beach cities like Santa Monica "do a great job" in daily beach maintenance and debris removal, but that holidays like Independence Day can be "brutal" due to the "intense number of people at the beaches." She added that beach cleanup can be difficult on these days, particularly with trying to empty trash cans people see on the sand. These cans begin to fill up rapidly, and seagulls and birds can pick at trash that overflows around the cans.
To remedy this, McCarthy recommends packing picnics with reusable materials moving forward, including bringing plates and forks from home, as well as keeping as much trash away from beach cans as possible.
"It’s really important to tuck a garbage bag into your picnic and pack out your supplies, getting it into a completely overflowing garbage can is not good enough," McCarthy said. "We need to take it home, and I think that’s just something that a good conscientious beachgoer can probably figure out."
For July 5 and beyond, Heal the Bay is an ocean health non-profit constantly at work helping local beaches, hosting over 400 cleanups per year. McCarthy said that these cleanups have involved "a big footprint of mighty-hearted volunteers," over 200,000 of them thus far, and that the cleanups are important in "tackling the difficult small plastics" that regular beach maintenance machines miss. The group is going to pass its two millionth pound of trash collected during its annual Coastal Cleanup Day later this year, something she called a "startling number" considering its status as a smaller non-profit.
McCarthy added that the work is paramount to global survival, as the ocean produces protein that sustains half of the planet’s population. Locally, a healthy coastal ecosystem is also a major economic driver for Santa Monica, making beach health ever-present.
"As a global partner, a global coastal partner, we play a role in preventing marine debris from entering the coastal system that really sustains half the planet, so it’s in our best interest to do our part to protect our piece of that global footprint," McCarthy said.
