POLLUTION FACTS

Trash | Car Pollutants | Mercury | Pharmaceuticals | Pet Waste

TRASH

 Bay Trash Hot Spots

What can you do? 

• First and foremost, don’t litter.
• Participate in community cleanups, like Save The Bay’s volunteer events.
• Pick up trash when you see it in the street or at the Bay shoreline and creeks.
• Support policies that will reduce the amount of trash discharged to the Bay.

Did you know?

• A study found an average of three pieces of trash along every foot of Bay Area streams that lead to the Bay!
• 90 percent of trash in our waterways does not biodegrade.

Remember the candy wrapper you dropped on the street, or the bag that the wind blew out of your car?  Chances are that those items are polluting the Bay and harming wildlife.  Trash is accumulating in bays and oceans worldwide – one study found plastic outweighing plankton (the building block of the food web) by 6 to 1.

Whether it’s plastic bags, bottles, cigarette butts or shopping carts, we have all seen trash in the Bay. And trash doesn’t just come from people carelessly tossing it into the water; it flows down the entire watershed through creeks and storm drains and ends up in the Bay.

Entanglement in trash kills thousands of animals every year.  Wildlife can’t tell trash apart from their regular diets (tiny Styrofoam beads can look just like fish eggs), and this “junk” food with no nutrients leads to starvation. Plastic is saturating our environment, with unknown long-term effects on wildlife.  Even biodegradable items like a brown paper bag can take months to break down.

CAR POLLUTANTS

What can you do?

• Wash your car at a car wash instead of at home.  Professional car washes treat the toxic soup that car washing generates before it is discharged into the Bay.
• Get your car tuned-up and fix leaks so oil and other fluids don’t flow to the Bay. 
• Drive less – walk, bike, or use public transportation.
• If you change your oil yourself, make sure you don’t drip or spill any.  And never dump the used oil!  Click here for tips. 

Did you know?

• People spill, dump or leak three million gallons of oil a year into San Francisco Bay.
• Regular people and our cars leak more oil into waterways than oil tankers do.

Cars get us places, but they generate pollutants that foul our waterways.  Hybrids and biodiesel vehicles aren’t immune, either.  All cars drip oil and other fluids that don’t break down easily and are toxic to wildlife. Friction from moving parts, like engines and brake pads, creates dusts of harmful metal particles including lead, zinc, and copper (which is so toxic to wildlife that one of its common uses is to kill algae on boats). 

Paved surfaces like roads and driveways collect these pollutants.  And when it rains, these toxins are washed into storm drains, where they flow to creeks or the Bay without treatment.  Further, washing your car in your driveway sends soap, oil, grease, and metals down storm drains and into creeks and the Bay. 

MERCURY

What can you do?

• Properly dispose of mercury-containing items – it is against the law to throw these items in the trash.
• Exchange your mercury thermometer for a non-toxic one, and take thermometers and fluorescent light bulbs (both long tubes and compacts) to your local household hazardous waste facility {link to earth911.org} for disposal.

Did you know?

• Mercury from one thermometer can contaminate 5,000,000 gallons of Bay water – or six Olympic-size swimming pools.
• High mercury levels may be keeping Bay fish and wildlife from reproducing.

Pounds of mercury that didn’t pollute the Bay (video)

Mercury is one of San Francisco Bay’s most infamous pollutants.  Because of the large amount of legacy mercury from the Gold Rush era, it’s critically important to reduce new inputs of mercury into the Bay. Mercury is toxic to living things.  It affects nervous systems and organ function in adult animals, and can disrupt development in embryonic or juvenile wildlife. Animals can absorb mercury from their food, and mercury levels get more concentrated with each step up the food chain. Birds, fish, and people who eat a lot of Bay fish are at high risk of mercury contamination. The state has issued advisories cautioning people, especially fishers, to limit their consumption of certain Bay fish.

PHARMACEUTICALS

What can you do?

• Don’t flush your unwanted medicine down the toilet or put it in the garbage.
• Dispose of unwanted or expired pharmaceuticals at a household hazardous waste facility or a pharmacy that accepts medication for proper disposal.  Click here for a list of locations around the Bay.

Did you know?

• Preliminary studies have already found acetominaphen in San Francisco Bay water.
• Flushed medications like estrogen are causing fish to switch genders – male fish grow egg sacs, or female fish turn male. 

Pharmaceutical pollution is an “emerging” water quality problem.  For decades, we were advised to flush unwanted or expired medicines down the toilet – and 35 percent of people still do this. However, wastewater treatment plants were not designed to remove these chemicals, and many of these chemicals pass through the treatment process and go into the Bay. Throwing medications in the trash isn’t a good choice either, because landfills leak.  Studies have found pharmaceutical components in the groundwater around landfills. 

Scientists are now able to detect low concentrations of many pharmaceutical drugs, such as painkillers, antidepressants, and hormones, in creeks and bays. Intersex fish – which have developed characteristics of the wrong sex after exposure to waterborne estrogen and other compounds – are becoming common occurrences around wastewater treatment plants.  In Colorado, there are ten female fish to every male fish around wastewater outfalls.  Don’t let that happen here!

PET WASTE

What can you do?

• Always pick up your pet’s waste – even in your own backyard – and throw the bagged waste in the trash.
• Try biodegradable bags.
• Keep dogs out of streams and stream banks.

Did you know?

• Bacteria from pet waste can make swimmers sick at beaches many miles away. This bacterial can also harm Bay fish and wildlife.
• High bacteria levels occurred more than 5000 times at California beaches in 2005 and beachgoers were advised not to swim.

Pet waste contains dangerous bacteria that can make people sick and has negative impacts on water quality. Just like motor oil or trash, pet waste left on the ground, can wash into storm drains that flow directly into the Bay, degrading water quality and threatening public health. Bay beaches are monitored for bacteria to ensure that the water quality is safe for swimming. High levels of bacteria force beach closures, robbing beachgoers of opportunities to swim, surf, windsurf and kayak.