Trash, Trash, Trash. Blame the Complainers

On November 22, 2008, community members gathered at Dog Beach in Ocean Beach to clean up trash. The number one litter found, as usual, cigarettes.

"Cigarette butts are the most littered item in The United States and the world." States the Surfrider Foundation.

Along with picking up trash, the people were given a paper to tally the types of trash they picked up and how much. That day 514 pounds of trash was collected. Walking around there was not big sized trash but small pieces. What I noticed was there was a lot of cigarette butts on the beach. I thought about the fact that they are illegal until the age of 18, and illegal on the beach. Because the age is 18, this is saying that with age comes responsibility, yet it is the number one litter.

It takes 10-12 years for a cigarette to decompose and there is some plastic in them that will never. Marine life, sea gulls and kids have all been witnessed incorporating them into their life. Marine life ingest them, sea gulls make nests with them and kids are using them with their sand castles.

A man smoking on the beach right by the lifeguard tower said, "There's signs everywhere," he said calling it "a bunch of crap."

There is two ways as always to take this, one being cigarettes are not that big of a deal and the other is they don't even pick up after themselves. "Cigarettes: 1.7 billion pounds of trash" coming from the Chicago Tribune. This is a lot of trash that marine life are eating, a way to stop this and protect the marine life is to throw away your trash.