Third Beach is my favourite beach in Vancouver. It’s where I go to dip in the water on a hot day. It’s where I go to watch people. Except on Tuesday nights, when there’s a drum circle. Not my vibe. (In contrast, my favourite people-watching memory is of a guy talking for an hour about crypto and NFTs back in 2022—he was wearing cowboy boots on the beach!) In August it was where I went to participate in a Saturday morning beach clean-up.

As a beach-lover, I’m ashamed to say it was my first time doing a clean-up. I absolutely will do this again. It’s easy. It’s casual and, dare I say, fun? The group organizing this clean-up was the Vancouver chapter of Surfrider Foundation, an international organization dedicated to the protection of the ocean, beaches, and waves, for the enjoyment of all people. They made the whole thing easy for the 40 or so of us who came out that morning. They gave us each a grabber and a bucket with a smaller receptacle in it for cigarette butts. They gave out a prize for the most unique item found: a plastic sandcastle toy. They’d hidden a plastic dinosaur on the beach, and the person who found it also got a prize.

And they gave out a prize for whoever collected the most cigarette butts, because, yes, even though smoking is banned on the beach in Vancouver—theoretically punishable with a minimum C$250 fine—the folks from Surfrider said cigarettes are the most common litter item picked up on beaches, even here. (And that was certainly my experience.) In fact, a 2019 study found that they are the most common piece of litter in the world, with 4.5 trillion butts littered each day. Yeah, they call it a “beach clean-up” but it really should be called a Find the Cancer Sticks in the Sand Party.

I hear you. People are still smoking? And littering? On a beach?!? Barf. Gross. For shame! Terrible garbage people.

Surprisingly to me, the City of Vancouver estimated a couple of years ago that residents litter more than 400,000 cigarette butts daily. That’s nearly half a million! There are only 662,248 people in Vancouver (according to the 2021 census), and many of those are under the legal smoking age. So how many smokers are in Vancouver? I don’t even know anyone who smokes cigarettes anymore. According to a University of Waterloo study, 7.7% of people in BC smoked cigarettes in 2019, which was the lowest percentage in the country. So 7.7% of the population of Vancouver is about 51,000 people. 

Now, take all 400,000 cigarette butts littered each day and divide them by the number of smokers, and that means each smoker is littering about eight butts a day. Terrible! They are treating the world as their ashtray. Let’s ban them from public life! Tar and feather them! Or pray that they get some terrible disease to make them pay for their pollution?

OK, I hear you, smokers-pretending-to-be-environmentalists. You’re wondering, just why is littering a cigarette butt so terrible? Well, not only is it disturbing to look down at the sand while you’re at the beach and see the word “cancer” sticking out, but the filters on cigarettes are made of cellulose acetate, which is a plastic that can take years to decompose. Beyond contributing to the glut of microplastics in our water, cigarette butts also contain toxic chemicals, including arsenic and lead. These toxins are leached from littered butts into the soil and water, harming plants, animals, and us.

Of course I’m not the first person to see how disgusting this is. But what is actually being done to address it? Why does this happen? Who are these litter monsters?

Let’s look at who smokes cigarettes. When psychologists have studied people who smoke these litter sticks, they found out that current smokers scored higher than non-smokers on neuroticism. They scored lower than non-smokers on agreeableness and conscientiousness (well, duh). Researchers also found out that smokers were characterized by an inability to resist cravings, a search for stimulation, and a lack of care for the consequences of their actions. So basically, they can’t help themselves. Damn it! Then let’s raise the price of cigarettes and put the money into cleaning up after them.

The Surfrider Foundation has suggested that we should make it easier for smokers to not litter in the first place. They tried giving away free “pocket ashtrays”: little pouches made of plastic and some flame-retardant material with a flap to trap the smell. But, get this, smokers didn’t like them because their disgusting smoke butts smell bad. One smoker unironically said to Hakai Magazine, “I mean, it’s so gross.” Dude! You’re so close, so close, to getting it. That’s what you smell like!

Let’s ban them from public life! Tar and feather them! Or pray that they get some terrible disease to make them pay for their pollution?

What else can be done? Well, the City could accept that people do smoke in outdoor spaces like the beach and provide receptacles (like the ones produced by private recycler TerraCycle) for people to properly dispose of their finished cancer sticks. Or would that encourage them? And who would empty those bins? Not the long-suffering lifeguards, who are already getting harassed by the drum circle people.

It might just be a lost cause. This is a worldwide problem. Raising awareness helps, right? So I guess that’s what I’m doing? Siiiigh.

The other thing I found a lot of during my beach clean-up day—OK, hour—was tiny bits of styrofoam. When I say “styrofoam,” I mean any expanded polystyrene foam (EPS), because that’s how most of us use the term. You know, the stuff you see in cheap coolers and electronics packaging. Styrofoam was invented in the early 1940s by Dow’s Chemical Physics Lab and is used in nearly everything: insulation for walls, roofs, and foundations; packaging; cars; petri dishes and sterile trays; and fishing and boating supplies. I once saw a photo of a cracked retaining wall outside a fancy home that showed the inside of the wall was styrofoam. It’s like the Everything Is Cake meme, but everything is plastic! No wonder it’s washing up on our shores.

EPS fragments are among the top five things Surfrider volunteers find at their beach clean-ups (the others are the aforementioned cigarette butts, plastic fragments bigger than a dime, plastic bits smaller than a dime, and plastic food wrappers). Like cigarettes, styrofoam pieces leach microplastics into our water. It’s estimated that they will take 500 years to biodegrade, but who knows how long it will really take, since styrofoam’s invention was less than a century ago. Regardless, we’ll all be dead.

So, how do we prevent styrofoam from ending up on our beaches? Well, banning it from single use as Australia has is one step we could take to reduce the environmental damage. Or we could embrace alternatives: there are now containers made from cornstarch; bagasse is a material made from sugarcane that is compostable and can be used to make food containers; even more-easy-to-recycle hard plastic like PET would be an improvement. Scientists are working on finding better alternatives, but it is proving to be a challenge, particularly with food safety being a concern. Alternatively, making it easier to recycle styrofoam would be helpful, too, because not everyone likes to save up their foam and visit the Zero Waste Centre to drop it off like I do.

Like so much of life, we’re in a group project where conscientious people are doing the work for others. People like you, dear reader. You probably are the person in your community to plant a garden, use the library, cancel your problematic company subscriptions, take fewer long-haul flights, do your laundry with cold water, buy secondhand, get a heat pump for your home, and attend a protest, while these smoking litterbugs drive monster trucks over the speed limit while drinking American beers and blasting Kid Rock. They simply do not give a fuck. It’s just the world we’re in. 

Five years ago, I wrote about the “Crying Indian” anti-litter ad campaign that ran in the 1970s (featuring an Italian-American actor pretending to be Indigenous). While I still stand by my argument in that piece that too much blame for environmental harms has been passed on to individuals, that doesn’t mean individuals shouldn’t also behave better. Until we can change to a more collective-minded and actually Indigenous-led society with stronger relationships to the planet, garbage on beaches is what we have to deal with.

Sigh. When is the general strike? 

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