This material was found as litter most often on San Diego's beaches

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — Litter has long been the scourge of San Diego's beaches, but what are the items most often found discarded?

In their 2023 Marine Debris Report, San Diego Coastkeeper and Surfrider Foundation broke down the kinds of littered materials picked up most often in their beach cleanup efforts last year, and items made of plastic — to no surprise — accounted for most of the trash they recovered.

According to the report, eight out of every 10 pieces of trash collected across more than 260 separate beach and inland cleanups in 2023 were some kind of plastic. This includes plastic fragments, food wrappers, food service items, bottles and caps, and bags.

At 21.1 percent, fragments accounted for the largest share of all items collected in these cleanups. According to the nonprofits, 63,433 pieces of plastic fragments were gathered in 2023 — the vast majority being mesoplastics, or bits smaller than 20 millimeters in size.

"This highlights the need for additional policy work targeting unnecessary single-use plastics that commonly end up on our beaches and in the ocean," Coastkeeper and Surfrider Foundation said in a joint statement on Monday.

The material that made up the second highest share of all discarded items was expanded polystyrene foam (EPS), also known as Styrofoam, with 49,402 items collected last year — up about three percent from 2022.

That increase comes as elected officials across the state are working to phase out use of Styrofoam, including the enactment of bans on their use by nine cities across San Diego County.

"With these foam bans in place and a potential statewide foam foodware ban going into effect next year, we are hopeful the amount of foam pollution along our coasts will decrease in the years to come," the report read.

These numbers pushed both plastic fragments and EPS above cigarette butts — the long-running top littered item found at San Diego's beaches — for the first time. In 2023, cigarettes accounted for about 15 percent of all items collected, down from about 20 to 25 percent in previous years.

However, the report noted that addressing littered cigarette butts is still a huge challenge, as it remains one of the top items found during cleanups in spite of public smoking bans at all publicly-owned beaches in San Diego County.

In total, the report said the two organizations collected 19,216 pounds of trash from coastal parks and shores throughout 2023, with upwards of 300,000 individual items.

"Our beach cleanup programs shed a local light on a global problem, the origins of which are far more complex than the common perception that we have a 'litter problem,'" the nonprofits wrote in the report. "The short answer is that we produce exponentially more waste than at any other time in history."

These cleanups, the environmental groups argue, are more effective when steps are also made to generate less trash — both while at the beach and in places that flow to the waters off the coast of San Diego.

"Individuals, businesses, and governments all have a role to play in keeping our oceans clean," the nonprofits added in the report.

The full 2023 Marine Debris report from Coastkeeper and Surfider can be found here.

For those that would like to get involved, Coastkeeper and Surfrider will be hosting a joint cleanup event at Ocean Beach Dog Beach next month on Saturday, May 11 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Additional cleanup dates can be found on the nonprofits' respective websites.