A summer day at the beach with friends and family, good food, nice waves, and lots of fun is the quintessential picture of California. On the Fourth of July, people flocked to the beaches all along our amazing coastline and enjoyed a day at the beach. After the day of festivities though, the beaches were quite literally “trashed”.
📸 Elliott Wright, South Bay
The next day, on the fifth of July (a day Surfrider has dubbed as the Dirtiest Beach Day of the Year) dedicated volunteers got up early, gathered supplies, and headed to the beaches to clean up the mess. Across the country this year, 37 different Surfrider chapters in 13 states hosted over 50 cleanup events on July fifth. During these cleanups, more than 1,800 volunteers removed over 16,000 pounds of trash and recyclables in just one day!
Here in California, our volunteers showed up in force from Humboldt all the way to San Diego, with 13 Surfrider Chapters hosting 18 cleanups. More than 1,000 volunteers showed up for our beaches and removed nearly 3,300 pounds of trash and recyclables!
Highlights Across California
The Humboldt, Sonoma Coast, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, Los Angeles, South Bay, Long Beach, South Orange County, and San Diego Chapters all led cleanups. Here are just a few snapshots of these fun and important events.
Dawn Sawyer: Sonoma Coast volunteers sorting trash and taking data. 
2 Christian Lepley: Marin cleanup at Bolinas Beach
Mary Simun: A South Bay Volunteer ready for the dirtiest beach day cleanup!
Michaela Coats: A volunteer cleaning up trash in South Orange County. Upstreaming the Problem
Surfrider volunteers collect data on the trash collected during cleanups and plastic continues to be a huge problem. The solution to plastic pollution lies in a combination of better public awareness, consumer choices, and policies at the local, state, and federal levels to reduce the amount of single-use plastic items produced in the first place. Check out the newly released 2025 Beach Cleanup Report to dive deeper into the data and the efforts being made to prevent plastic pollution at Surfrider.
So what can you do?
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Bring your own reusable cups, plates, and silverware and skip the single-use plastic.
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Pack it in, Pack it out! Make sure everything you bring to the beach leaves when you do.
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Support Ocean Friendly Restaurants and Hotels who are reducing single-use plastics.
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Take action through one of Surfrider’s Action Alerts to change the policies at the local, state, and federal level in the first place.
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And of course, you can find your local chapter and join a cleanup or join as a member to support the ongoing efforts!
As Northern California Regional Manager, Sara supports the chapters from San Mateo County up to Humboldt County. After earning a B.S. in Ecology from UC San Diego and an M.S. in Marine Science from UC Santa Barbara, she has focused her career on developing and delivering science education and outreach programs to foster ocean literacy, create connection, and to instill the importance of protecting our oceans to audiences of all ages.