Hundreds clean up SF’s Ocean Beach for Surfrider Earth Day event

Earth Day may have been Saturday, but that didn’t stop volunteers from showing up at Ocean Beach on Sunday morning to participate in the Surfrider Foundation’s annual Earth Day beach clean-up. Three stations along Ocean Beach — at Stairwell 17, Noriega Street and Sloat Boulevard — welcomed a total of about 250 volunteers on Sunday morning. Surfrider, a nonprofit group devoted to coastal defense, provided gloves, trash pickers and buckets, and volunteers set out to collect as much debris as they could find on the shores. Afterward, Surfrider hosted a block party on 45th Avenue with live music, barbecue and beers poured by local breweries Woods and Calicraft. Earth Day each year helps Surfrider shout its message a little louder, but organizing beach clean-ups is business as usual for the organization, which holds three clean-up days every month. Though many San Franciscans may not realize it, pollution and waste throughout the entire city have big impacts on the water quality of our coastline. [...] trash thrown into the bay on the city’s eastern side gets flushed by currents through the Golden Gate, where eddies throw the debris into the ocean. Surfrider was founded in 1984 in Malibu, when a group of surfers formed a coalition to protest development plans along the beach where they surfed. Many of Surfrider’s programs here are dedicated to preempting the cycle of waste that leads to beach pollution: campaigns against single-use plastic, for example, and efforts to put cigarette ash cans around the city — so that those materials later don’t end up in the ocean. In addition to pollution, another big focus for Surfrider is coastal erosion, and it is trying to push local government to implement a managed retreat solution.