What did you do on Oct. 24, the International Day of Climate Action?** I was at the Blogger Beach Cleanup** on Santa Monica beach in Calif. — an event I organized with fellow eco-activist Sara Bayles, who writes The Daily Ocean.**

25 of the more than 100 volunteers who showed up got free FilterForGood reusable bottles — which many used at the event itself. Why spend money on disposable plastic water bottles that are bad for the environment, when we’ve got free water fountains right on the beach?

The trash we picked up really showed why we must use reusables. In just 20 minutes, the volunteers picked up almost 40 pounds of trash on the beach — and a lot of the stuff were disposable containers — including plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups!

Most FilterForGood blog readers have already taken the pledge to banish disposable plastic bottled water from their lives — which is why I wanted to talk a bit about Styrofoam — a.k.a. polystyrene. The cost of recycling Styrofoam / polystytrene is so high — and the logistics so difficult — that most cities don’t offer a recycling option for these containers. Instead, a number of cities have simply banned the blight that’s Styrofoam to prevent the tough-to-recycle trash from collecting in the first place.

Santa Monica, in fact, is one of the cities that has successfully banned Styrofoam. After all, because it’s a beach city, Santa Monica has even more to lose by letting Styrofoam into its borders. Besides overfilling landfills, Styrofoam makes its way onto the beaches and into the ocean — shredding into little pieces and creating an eyesore — which isn’t good for attracting tourists. Even grosser are the birds and other marine life that die and sometimes wash up on the beach because they’ve ingested too much plastic — which then prevents the animals from ingesting anything actually digestible.

But a ban on Styrofoam in Santa Monica alone won’t solve the Styrofoam pollution problem — not even on our own beach. Styrofoam’s still legal in Los Angeles and other surrounding cities — which means that every time it rains, Styrofoam gets washed down the gutters straight out onto the beach and into the ocean. We can’t stop the problem as a city alone because our environment connects all of us.

A bill to ban Styrofoam throughout California** was unfortunately pulled from consideration earlier this year, but the fight to keep banning the stuff in more cities and counties pushes on. What’s your city’s stance on Styrofoam? Get involved with local environmental organizations fighting against Styrofoam (in the L.A.-area, one nonprofit to join’s Heal the Bay)!** And while we wait for policy changes, we can all ban Styrofoam from our individual lives! Expand your FilterForGood pledge to reduce not just disposable bottled water waste but Styrofoam waste too!

Photos by Bryan Koch

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