Drinking And Beach Litter On San Diego Beaches

San Diego is now rated as the #1 Booziest City.  In a recent study by Delphi Behavioral Health Group who received the information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics determined that San Diego spends more money for liquor than any other city.  Apparently the average person spent an average of $1,112  on alcohol last year. 

In another article San Diego was named #5 best drinking cities… and it shows up on the beach and the roadways. Our streets are littered with beer cans and bottles. 

Why is this? According to CraftBeerSanDiego.com there were in  2018…. 199 breweries and tasting rooms in San Diego, making San Diego a top destination spot for beer connoisseurs.

Despite all the craft breweries, the number one beer, I find on the beach is Modelo followed by Budweiser and Coors.

Trashcans are overflowing with beer and liquor packaging, broken glass strews the boardwalk and parking lots. Bottles, cans and packaging, o-rings, caps are going out to sea. With an average of 7 illegal fires per night, most have cases of beer, wine and liquor and the accompanying trash all in one mile of oceanfront in South Mission Beach.

And the police do NOTHING. The LIFEGUARDS do NOTHING. Glass, drinking, smoking is illegal on the beach, yet at any moment and right in front of the lifeguards.. you can find people drinking, vaping, smoking using both glass and liquor.

Craft brewing is big business. In San Diego country they produced more than 1.1 million barrels of beer in 2017.. which is up about 22% from 2016. This is from an economic impact study by the San Diego Brewers Guild and California State University San Marcos’ (CSUSM) Office of Business Research and Analysis. (Source))

While it’s great that the craft brewing has brought in San Diego $851 million in 2015, and employment is estimated to be 4512 staff. San Diego paid about 7% of the total craft breweries taxes ($100 million estimate).. but what about our beaches? 

And how much has that contributed to the drunk driving and litter? Drunks sleeping it off on the beach, drunks joyriding in parking lots, drinkers getting locked in parking lots and getting stuck in the sand. When I see a case of beer, bottles of tequila and know those people got back in their car or rode a scooter… 

It is not just the cardboard packaging, the plastic bag they came in, the receipt put in the bag, the munchies they bought, the bottle caps, the O-Rings, the Red Cups, champagne glasses, wine glasses, wine corks… plastic are thrown everywhere. They litter from the sand to the streets.. Ask any metal detector.. they will tell you the #1 thing they pick up is metal bottle caps from beer.

The broken glass is all over, the sand, the parking lots, the picnic areas. Is this what we want to do is pay The Park and Recreation staff to spend an hour everyday picking up liquor trash? The first thing they have to do when they arrive is patrol the parking lot and and lawn to pick up glass..

What if you brought your family to Belmont Park and found a minefield of broken glass, lit fires, open liquor containers, rats, dog crap and trash? Would you really recommend this to your family?

A typical day at the Belmont Park parking lot is 3 broken glass and that does not even count the other 3 parking lots which are just as bad.

Typical sights.. Jim Beam is one of the top glass liquors picked up on the beach.

90% of the 100 trashcans (Spring-Summer-Fall) in the 1 mile of oceanfront beach are filled with evidence of liquor. Worse, they fill them up so much that we have several case of trashcan overflow. All the styrofoam and food packaging gets scattered by seagulls and the wind.

Many canners are on bikes and walking. There is little or no money in glass recycling and it’s heavy. Ergo.. the glass is left behind. The glass goes into a landfill. it is NOT Recycled. In fact all trash from the beach goes into a landfill.

The Sand.. why not go and enjoy the waves and just leave everything behind, along with your chair, towel, condom and food.

Who pays?? Taxpayers pay. In fact, California alone spends $428.00 per year for beach cleaning, with San Diego paying around $14 Million. Our understaffed Park and Rec department are constantly hindered by this trash.. they have to get out, clean up this mess and it takes time. Most of their machines are broken and they are constantly skirting the drunks or homeless on the beach. To top it off.. when there is an illegal lit fire, they have to call in another truck just to clean up that mess.

The reason you see so much glass (illegal) is because 60% of people surveyed said beer tastes better in a glass bottle.

The fire pits (March-October) are filled with broken glass and trash. Of the 10 legal fire pits 80% of them are filled with evidence of liquor.

You may say, where are the police.. we in Mission Beach wonder the same thing. Do you know that Mission Beach has one of the highest crime rates in San Diego? I wonder how much of this crime rate is due to drinking?

Illegal Fires are a fact of life in South Mission Beach… Party on… grab some wood or a pallet and set your own fire.. an average of 7 illegal fires per night… with many still burning in the morning. Very rarely do you just see fire evidence without trash and liquor.

When you google ‘drinking on the beach in San Diego’.. all the forums say it’s OK as long as you do it ‘quietly’. Seriously.. People are not stupid, drinking and drugs begat more drinking and drugs. Hey.. they are doing it, so can I…. we are City-County-Country of lemmings. What laws?

For 4 months, I did a study to evaluate how much of the beach trash was due to alcohol. After the millennials and their trash, Alcohol is the 2nd largest contributor to beach trash. Both categories involve food wrappers, which technically speaking is the #1 source of beach litter.

During this time, I did some canning (picking out of trash cans) along with the trash on the beach. This is not a true count because it depended how much the canners they picked up, how much I gave to the homeless,  when the beach screeners and garbage trucks came. I did not pick up 99% of the glass.. That means that the glass liquor count is much larger than than stated below.

These are the statistics for 1 mile of South Mission Beach Oceanfront Only:

Liquor

• 3220 Aluminum Beer Cans
• 988 Glass Liquor Bottles
• 69 Plastic Liquor

Total: 4299 Alcohol Beverages

Non-Alcohol 

• 1772 Aluminum Soda
• 5527 Plastic Bottles
• 137 Glass Soda

Total: 7436 Non-Alcohol Beverages

32% (not counting glass) of what is being drunk on the beach is alcohol. If I had to make an educated guess, I would round the total number up to 40% if not higher.

Who trashes? The locals would say that it is tourists or students and there is some truth to that, but not all. The locals would also say, it is the homeless.. they are not the ones trashing the beach with liquor. They pick up the bottles and cans on the beach, many may partake the gallons of liquor left on the beach, they may be sleeping on the beach.. but at least in South Mission they are not the major beach-trashers of the beach.

Then to top everything off, our mayor Kevin Faulconer in his 2019 State of the City address said:

“I’ll renew my commitment to clean up our city and protect our natural environment.

You will see more crews removing garbage and graffiti. More community cleanups. And even faster responses when you use the Get It Done app.

This is our city.

So we’re saying “yes!” to clean parks.

“Yes!” to clean sidewalks.

And “yes!” to a Clean SD!”

So here we are in one of the top 5 destinations in San Diego, re-known for the dirtiest beach, in an area of the highest crime rate and nobody does anything to enforce any of the 10 laws being broken everyday in 1 mile of beachfront. We do not have a clean beach.

I haven’t even gotten into pot, smoking and vaping, which go hand in hand with drinking .

The ocean is the top resource in the world.. each of us cannot live without it. Many lives depend it and San Diego would not be who they are without our ocean and beaches.

The point: If one person drinks on the beach then others are going to follow. When one drinks one becomes less responsible. If no laws are enforced the situation gets worse.

All of that leads to increase in marine debris and beach trash. The more trash on the ocean, the more San Diego contributes to Ocean Pollution. The more trash on the beach, the less tourist dollars.. the less tourist dollars… and the more taxpayer monies.

The other reality.. this is not just during the summer months, it is all year long.

By the way, I did request from the San Diego Police Department the number tickets they have given out, they have refused to give out that information.

For more Pictures of Mission Beach Liquor Trash see our Facebook Album 

Resources

• Craft Beer in San Diego 
• Brew Bound 
• American Alcohol Expenditures