getting to the source of plastics and trash in our waterways
By Eleanor Jaeger

Clean Water Action wanted to know where all the plastics and trash in the world’s oceans and inland waterways, such as the San Francisco Bay, are coming from. Research has long held that 80% of ocean debris is generated from land-based sources. It enters waterways through the storm drain system or gets blown into waterways from open garbage dumps and trash containers. But where is all that trash originating? There research just wasn’t there.

Meanwhile, in California, some Regional Water Quality Control Boards have required local jurisdictions in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas to eliminate trash discharges to waterways. Local governments are meeting these requirements through increased litter collection, expensive devices to capture trash in the storm drain system, and public education. While these responses can control litter, they are costly and require taxpayer funding in perpetuity. They do nothing to reduce the amount of trash that is generated to begin with.

Clean Water Action and Clean Water Fund’s “Taking Out the Trash” program seeks to identify the types of trash being generated and to develop creative solutions to eliminate them at the source.

Clean Water Action partnered with four local jurisdictions

• South San Francisco, Richmond, Oakland, and San Jose
• and conducted a litter audit in them over the 2010 to 2011 winter months. Volunteer trash monitors collected trash at six different sites within the four jurisdictions and identified more than 11,300 pieces of litter. The data collected helped provide a snap shot of each jurisdiction’s litter.

The Results:

• Cigarettes are the most highly littered product, with quantities too high to count.
• Food and beverage packaging accounted for 67% of the litter collected.
•  The biggest known sources were primarily businesses that do “to go” food service: fast food (49%), grocery stores (11%), convenience stores (10%), retail stores (8%), and café/coffee shops (7%).

Solutions for Businesses:

As the biggest source of food and beverage related litter, the food and beverage take-out industry has the most significant role to play in solutions. Clean Water Fund is identifying ways that this industry can reduce its reliance on single use disposable products. Recommendations to be shared in a new Clean Water Fund report to the industry and local governments include:

• Encourage customers’ use of “bring your own” food and beverage containers.
• Provide more receptacles for garbage, recycling, and composting, making sure that all container types are properly covered.
• Implement an “Ask First” policy before providing additional items such as receipts, napkins, and bags.
• Use bulk dispensers for products such as straws and condiments to help eliminate unnecessary single-serve packaging.
• Establish “take-back” programs which require suppliers to take back and re-use or recycle packaging.
• Educate employees and customers about how to reduce disposables.

Solutions for Local Jurisdictions:


• Incentivize businesses to adopt practices that reduce disposable foodware use.
• Enact measures that charge customers extra for “to go” packaging, thereby encouraging reusable containers.
• Enact measures that require “for here” meals to be served with reusable plates or cups.
• Introduce a disposable packaging reduction program.
• Provide litter education and outreach.
• Enforce anti-litter rules.

Taking Out the Trash revealed that up to 40% of the trash studied could be replaced with reusables, such as reusable food and beverage containers.

Substituting reusable products for disposable ones, can eliminate as much as 27% of disposable foodware and 13% of hot and cold bever-age containers. For more information about this study is at www.cleanwateraction.org/ca

What Can You Do?

Bring your own! Bring your own mug, re-usable cold drink container, bags, and food containers!