No Filter: San Francisco's Newest Butt Blog

The Naked Truth: 8,950 butts from Ocean Beach and Baker Beach

In the year and a half since we launched the San Francisco "cheek" of the very successful Surfrider Hold on to Your Butt cigarette waste reduction program, we've kept more than 71,000 cigarette butts from entering our oceans and waterways. Our predecessors in San Diego and Huntington Beach, taught us everything we needed to get the program up and running, and we at the SF chapter can't thank them enough for that!

I'm Shelly, I lead SF's Hold on to Your Butt program, and I'm starting this new blog, "No Filter," to share information with San Franciscans and Surfriders alike. And giving a shameless plug for our Instagram feed @holdontoyourbutt, the Surfrider SF Facebook page, and the requisite butt pic with the naked truth: the 8,950 cigarette butts shown here were all collected at Ocean Beach and Baker Beach, and represent but a small fraction of the 4.5 trillion cigarette butts littered around the world every year.

Butts that end up on beaches don't necessarily start there: all roads lead to the ocean, and a butt that's flicked in the Mission can easily end up getting snuffed up by a dog at Ocean Beach or swallowed by a seagull along the Embarcadero.

Why do smokers litter these plastic, toxic cigarette butts? Why does Big Tobacco persist in sticking plastic filters on the number one most littered item in the world? Why doesn't San Francisco do more to mitigate this toxic waste? And most importantly, how can we stop this from happening once and for all? We'll explore this and more right here.