The shoreline of San Francisco Bay is a special place where people gather to do all sorts of activities: hiking and biking, fishing, cultural and spiritual activities, photography, water sports, and more. One thing that Save The Bay regularly engages in is far less fun but crucial for the Bay’s health – cleaning up trash pollution.

This month, our staff organized a cleanup at the MLK Regional Shoreline in Oakland where, together with great volunteers, we removed more than 1,300 pounds of trash from the regional park. Trash in the Bay is a huge problem that harms wildlife, impacts people’s enjoyment of the shoreline, and contributes to the growing problem of microplastic in the oceans.

While we are grateful to the volunteers for helping improve the shoreline, preventing trash from reaching the Bay in the first place is our goal. Much of the trash that ends up on the shoreline isn’t dumped there but instead starts as litter on the streets. A focus of our pollution prevention advocacy has been on how to control trash pollution from traveling from our streets through a largely unfamiliar source – our region’s storm drain system.

The Trashy Problem

Most of the storm drains in the Bay Area were designed and built decades ago with the goal of quickly removing rainwater from our streets and neighborhoods to prevent flooding and damage. What the designers of these systems didn’t consider was that these storm drains would also transfer anything floating in the water – like plastic trash – out to the Bay. The storm drains became an efficient trash delivery system to choke the Bay with tons of pollution every year.

Starting in 2010, a regional agency responsible for protecting water quality in the Bay – the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board – adopted regulations placing the responsibility on Bay Area cities to prevent trash from flowing through storm drains and out to the Bay. Recognizing that this was going to be a monumental task, the cities were given more than a decade to design plans and build projects that would either ensure that trash wasn’t entering the drains or capture any that does.

Cities have primarily invested in filter systems that capture trash in the drains or within stormwater pipes. That trash is then removed and discarded. There are many different designs, but they largely function in a similar way – using steel screens that can prevent items as small as a cigarette butt from finding their way to the Bay. Cities also focused on cleaning trash off the streets before it rains, both through maintenance crews and street sweeping vehicles. Most cities have decided to use a combination of trash management approaches.

Save The Bay has worked for the past 15 years to hold cities accountable for keeping trash out of the storm drains. We regularly review cities’ progress and urge the Regional Water Board to enforce the law. We’ve also worked to ensure that these trash reduction requirements aren’t weakened. This year we are approaching a milestone where cities will be required to show by June that they are fully preventing all trash from entering their storm drain system.

Litter is a Highway

Cities aren’t the only ones responsible for preventing stormwater trash pollution. Anyone who has driven on a highway has seen large piles of trash on the shoulder of the road. Caltrans, which operates the state highway system, also owns and manages a large storm drain system and much of that roadway trash eventually ends up in the Bay. Caltrans has a similar trash pollution prevention requirement from the Regional Water Board, but for many years failed to take the necessary steps to ensure it was complying with the law.

Save The Bay’s advocacy resulted in the Water Board finding Caltrans in violation of clean water laws in 2019, and it responded with a strict schedule that Caltrans must follow for controlling all trash from the highway system, or else face fines. We’ve tirelessly worked to ensure that Caltrans has been held to account, and we’ve seen a lot of progress. While Caltrans has a slightly longer timeframe than the cities have to comply, it also is rapidly approaching a deadline to show that it is fully preventing trash pollution from the state highway system from polluting the Bay.

What has all this effort over the past 15 years resulted in? Cities have invested heavily in trash capture devices, installing more than 17,000 by 2023. More are being added as they work to meet the final trash control deadline of June 2025. Additional street sweeping and litter cleanups are now taking place in cities across the region. Cities have banned plastic bags, Styrofoam, and plastic “to-go” containers to eliminate some of the most common products that end up as litter. Caltrans has installed screens to capture trash from more than 4,500 acres of local highways and has partnered with cities to build large trash capture facilities that treat entire watersheds so that trash removal is more efficient and cost-effective.

With all this effort over the past 15 years, how do we know that this is working?

The best way to measure success is to study what comes out of the stormwater pipes as they flow into creeks and the Bay. That often involves installing a net and seeing what gets caught when the water flows. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since we have thousands of storm drain pipes across the region. It’s also logistically difficult to measure trash flows during a storm, when the conditions can threaten the safety of people sampling the water.

There is an effort underway to do this work and we’re starting to see the results. Initial indications are that minimal trash is now flowing through the storm drains in areas with trash screens and other effective control methods in place, but more data is needed. As we learn more, Save The Bay will stay engaged with the Water Board and the cities to address any findings that indicate that improvements need to be made.

Even if we are successful in eliminating the role that the storm drains play in polluting the Bay, there will still be more to do. Trash is always going to be a problem. Lots of trash is dumped on or near the shoreline – not relying on the storm drains to move it there. And until we solve our regional housing crisis, trash resulting from the lack of services available to unsheltered populations will remain a challenge for water quality regulators.

Cutting Off the Source

To address these remaining sources, Save The Bay will continue to engage in statewide legislation to address the most common litter items. We led many of the early efforts to ban plastic bags in the Bay Area, and last year supported a bill (SB1053) to finally ban all single-use plastic carry out bags at grocery stores. We’ve also supported efforts to restrict single-use plastic food containers and are evaluating proposals to target additional single-use plastics at the state level.

Single-use plastics are designed to be cheap and convenient but controlling the trash pollution that they create is complicated and expensive. Ultimately, the best solution is to eliminate these types of plastics from our lives, and to create less trash in the first place. Everyone can do their part to make that a reality. But in the meantime, managing and controlling trash in our environment remains a necessity.

Keeping trash out of the storm drains has taken more than fifteen years of work by advocates, regulators, city and state staff, and many others. We’re committed to this type of long-term advocacy to ensure that we are creating a healthier Bay for everyone to enjoy. Hopefully in the future shoreline cleanups like we hosted this month won’t be necessary, and people can just enjoy the Bay as it should be – a beautiful and thriving environment for recreation, relaxation, and connecting with each other and the natural world.