Beer cans, cigarette butts dominate clean-up effort

When Eduardo Leyba picked up trash around Bluffton on Saturday morning, the majority of litter he collected consisted of beer cans and cigarette butts.

He was one of numerous volunteers who joined government officials, high school students and clubs in a communal effort to clean Bluffton and the May River on foot and by boat or kayak for the 28th Annual Beach Sweep and River Sweep.

Leyba, a senior at Bluffton High School, came to help with other members of the Interact Club, an organization at the high school that provides volunteer opportunities for students. He said he thought open container laws and fear of arrest where the reasons he found so many beer cans during his “sweep.”

“A lot of drivers that are scared to get caught by police or they drink beer normally and they bring it in their cars, they just have to throw it out somewhere,” he said. “I think it’s just by paranoia that they just throw it out.”

Leyba wasn’t alone in his theory.

Richard Gutierrez, Jovana Edcamilla and Jimena Martinez, Bluffton High School juniors of the Interact Club, said they also noticed a prevalence of beer cans.

Beth Lewis, a stormwater technician with the town’s Stormwater Management Division, led the Bluffton sweep efforts and said cigarette butts were a huge source of litter.

“I think it’s because people don’t equate that as litter,” she said. “You know, you toss it out of your car or in a park and you don’t really see that as litter. So, it’s really important that people dispose of their cigarette butts appropriately.”

Lewis said there were about 200 to 250 volunteers, a comparable gathering comparable to last year’s sweeps. Edcamilla said she noticed more people at this year’s event, but she and her friends said they were picking up more trash than usual.

“There’s more people moving in here, so there’s more people, which (means) more trash,” Gutierrez said.

Lewis said all the trash that’s collected is tracked to determine how much was gathered.

“It looks like people are coming back with a little more fuller bags than previous years,” she said.

Mike Bennett, owner of local recycle waste company i2 Recycle, has offered his services for the Bluffton sweep for the past few years. He said his company probably recycles about 50 to 60 percent of the waste collected.

“We’ll (typically collect) about a ton and a half,” he said. “It ranges — a ton, a ton and a half, just depends on what we get.”

As the sweep wrapped up around noon, Lewis said it was important for people to understand that the area is a watershed and stormwater runoff can have an effect on neighboring waters.

“There’s a connection between the land and the water,” she said.

This story was originally published September 17, 2016 at 7:02 PM with the headline "Beer cans, cigarette butts dominate clean-up effort."