Article

By Majken Talbot

Pack Your Trash!
September 30, 2024—Head down to Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz and you'll spot some familiar stickers on the trash cans: the eye-catching graphic of a goofy-looking surfer guy [aka The Geek] cluelessly tosses away an empty Coke bottle as a huge wave filled with beach trash threatens to engulf him. The bold slogan punches home the message: Pack Your Trash! This stern reminder is brought to you by PPNF or the Pleasure Point Night Fighters.

Surfers or Trash-Fighting Teen Superheroes?
The name Pleasure Point Night Fighters sounds like an evildoer-fighting superhero team straight out of the Marvel Universe, but the comparison may not be that far off. In the 1960s, Jim Phillips, then a teen surfer, spearheaded the formation of two competitive surf clubs at Pleasure Point. Unexpectedly, the first order of business of the newly formed Pleasure Point Surfer's Association was to repurpose 55-gallon resin drums and place them along the cliffs of East Cliff Drive for the public to dump their beach trash.

What prompted an upstart crew of surfer teens to take on the arduous and smelly task of beach cleanups? Perhaps they were tired of their favorite surf spot being used as a dumping ground. The Pleasure Point beach area lies in an unincorporated part of Santa Cruz, so services like trash collection and park maintenance are operated by the county which has limited funding. By the 1960s, the situation was so notoriously bad that a local newspaper ran an unflattering front-page feature with a cover photo of a broken porcelain toilet and a mountain of rusty beer cans piled on the beach. The article disparaged the surfers as delinquents and beach bums. But the surfers proved them wrong.

The newly formed Surfing Association started a free trash pickup service for the beach and even paid the dump fees themselves. The PPSA constructed a float for the 1965 Miss America Parade—which then took place in Santa Cruz—to get their message out to the community. They converted a VW Beetle into a giant crepe-paper trash can draped with the banner: “Keep Your Beaches Clean!”

In the 1980s, Westside competitive surfer Harry Conti joined Jim Phillips, and the club was relaunched as the Pleasure Point Night Fighters. The PPNF became incorporated as a nonprofit with a charter, code, and dues. Members pooled their finite resources to buy a dump truck. Each week, they drove their trash route from Rivermouth in Santa Cruz to Sunset Beach in Watsonville to collect 40 trash cans and take them to the dump. Jim Phillips, now a highly successful graphic artist known for the Santa Cruz Skateboards Screaming Blue Hand logo, created the "Geek Surfer" mascot with the "Pack Your Trash" slogan.

In the early 2000s, Harry Conti brought the Pack Your Trash message to thousands of school children. He joined the Board of Save Our Seas Hawaii to bring the movement to the islands. The message resonated with surfers and coastal communities globally. Soon, PPNF had chapters worldwide ranging from New Zealand to South Africa, with an estimated one million followers. After all these decades of campaigning to save the waves and beaches, Conti still hasn't slowed down. Today, he is recruiting a whole new generation of Pleasure Point Night Fighters to continue the work.

Building an Army of Volunteers
Beach cleanups are not just fun; they are critical tools in the battle against plastic pollution in our oceans. The problem is that plastics take 500-1000 years to degrade. Even then, they don't fully break down; they just get smaller. These microplastic particles are almost impossible to remove from water. As a result, they get ingested by birds, crabs, and fish and move up the food chain to humans.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, which is why the beach cleanup has gone global. Stop the plastic before it gets to the water. Each year, over 8 million metric tons of plastic enter our oceans, the bulk of it from land-based littering.

In response, a growing army of volunteers is tackling this existential environmental crisis head-on. This volunteer work is critical to maintaining the health and vitality of our planet’s coastal ecosystem.

Back in Santa Cruz, in the past four years, 37,000 volunteers collected more than a million trash items in beach cleanups along the Monterey Bay. This trash would otherwise have ended up in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Save Our Shores: Grassroots activism saves a marine sanctuary
One of the local nonprofits leading these beach cleanups is Save Our Shores. The world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary exist today thanks in part to the grassroots activism of Save Our Shores (SOS). Founded in the 1970s to protest offshore drilling, the environmental organization galvanized the community to shut down sand mining operations and saved Manresa State Beach from a private development scheme.

Mentoring the Ocean Stewards of Tomorrow
Today, SOS dedicates a third of its resources to education. Its website provides grade-level, standards-aligned lesson plans on the topics of marine ecosystems and water pollution.

A year ago, SOS extended its educational offerings by piloting a Junior Sanctuary Steward program. The pioneering program mentors students from underserved communities for 12-15 weeks. It provides a weekly after-school field trip to a beach, river, wetland, or slough. This fall, middle school students visited Salinas State Beach to participate in the “Limpets” program. Students dug in the sand to tally the number of Sandcrabs present in the ecosystem. State ecologists will use this important data to monitor the health of the species. SOS is seeking more grant funding to continue this outstanding program next year.

Advocating for Better Policy— Butts are on the Ballot in Santa Cruz
This year SOS has mounted a "Ban the Butts" campaign. On Oct. 8, 2024, the board will meet to consider implementing a ban on the sale of filtered tobacco products in Santa Cruz County. SOS is urging the public to write letters in support of this ban to the County Board of Supervisors.

Cigarette filters are made of plastic microfibers and are a common trash item collected on beach cleanups. Over the past decade, SOS volunteers have collected over 400,000 cigarette butts from beaches and other public areas. Even worse, cigarette butts are considered toxic waste because they leach chemicals like lead, nicotine, and arsenic into the soil and water.

David vs. Goliath—The Battle Against Big Plastic
It's evident to anyone who's done a beach cleanup that our single-use plastic consumption is out of control. Our oceans, bays, and rivers cannot indefinitely sustain the mountains of plastic trash flowing into them. Public awareness and action are growing, but so is the crisis. According to the Ocean Conservancy, over half the plastics currently in existence have been produced in just the last 20 years. The clock is ticking.

In September, 2024, Surfrider filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil for lying to the public for decades about the recyclability and disposability of single-use plastic. Perhaps the tide is finally turning on plastic pollution.