More than 7,000 volunteers picked up nearly 5 tons of trash from San Diego County beaches last year, according to a report from San Diego Coastkeeper and the local Surfrider Foundation.

As the volunteers pick up the trash from the beaches, they note each kind of debris. Cigarette butts represented 41 percent of trash picked up, followed by assorted plastics and plastic food wrappers.

In 2015, 197,798 individual pieces of trash were picked up along the coastline.


The number of items picked up decreased slightly from the previous year, with nearly 15,000 fewer items. This year also had a slight dip in volunteers, with 392 fewer people cleaning local beaches.

Fiesta Island was the beach that had the most trash picked up per volunteer, with 4.68 pounds, which weighs slightly more than two 2-liter bottles of soda. It was the second straight year for Fiesta Island to have that distinction.

Nearly half of all of the trash picked up was plastic. This raised concern for marine and coastal wildlife.


“Plastics are particularly damaging to the marine environment, as they do not biodegrade and are easily ingested by wildlife,” the volunteers wrote in their news release.

The group also noted that the number of plastic bags was relatively low, as bags represented only 2 percent of all the trash.

Since 2007, the groups have picked up 72,325 pounds of trash.