Click here to see the data of what was collected on Annual Coastal Cleanup Day in Santa Cruz County.

The 25th Annual Coastal Cleanup Day marked the largest community wide cleanup effort in Santa Cruz County to date. 3,802 volunteers removed 9,012 pounds of trash and 3,903.5 pounds of recycle from our local beaches, rivers, sloughs, and kelp beds.

Save Our Shores offered 50 cleanup sites throughout the County including beach, river, slough, kayak, SCUBA, and paddle boarding sites. By far our river sites yielded the most trash in pounds, while volunteers down on the beach collected thousands of smaller pieces of debris such as cigarette butts, plastic pieces, and Styrofoam pieces.

Thanks to over 1,200 students in Santa Cruz, our volunteer capacity has grown significantly. We are proud of our local students and commend them on their hard work and dedication to keeping our ocean healthy. Additionally, we had many more local businesses get involved this year by sending employees down to our cleanup sites.

Save Our Shores is proud to locally coordinate this key effort in the fight against marine debris, a growing threat to the world’s oceans. While Coastal Cleanup Day is the largest community-wide cleanup event that Save Our Shores runs, SOS conducts both beach and river cleanups throughout the year. In the last two years, SOS volunteers have removed 80,000 pounds of debris from Santa Cruz County’s waterways and beaches during 340 cleanups. Specifically, volunteers removed a total of more then 75,000 cigarette butts, over 24,000 pieces of plastic, over 13,000 plastic bags, and over 12,000 Styrofoam pieces.

Ocean Trash is one of the most significant threats to our oceans today.  Each year more than 1 million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish have died from ingesting or becoming entangled in ocean trash, specifically plastic debris.

Save Our Shores will be posting results for California as well as nationally and internationally soon.  

The California Coastal Commission has an online survey to help local coordinators recruit additional volunteers as well as to help us become more effective with our outreach to you. We value your suggestions and comments, so please use the following link to fill out this survey: http://california-coastal-commission.survey.sgizmo.com