Less trash on the beach? How Tybee Island's anti-litter efforts have resulted in cleaner sands

The morning after the Labor Day crowds started to file off of Tybee Island, Marie Rodriguez scanned up and down a section of south beach collecting trash off the sand.

She's been picking up beach litter on Tybee for 33 years. She has a regular area she covers, walking the beach in an orderly grid to not miss a single straw wrapper or plastic spoon. This Tuesday, it is mostly pieces of cardboard-like material from the fireworks set off over the holiday weekend from the pier mixed in with cigarette butts and pieces of plastic, all only yards from the water.

"Somebody has to do it," Rodriguez said. "You have to be that someone, and make it happen. Imagine if nobody cleaned the beach."

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Rodriguez, a member of the Tybee planning commission, is one of the many residents dedicated to keeping the island's most valued natural resource clean. But even with the rising tides of tourists coming each summer season, authorities and volunteers on Tybee seem confident that their ability to stymie the flow of trash is getting stronger.

The captain at the helm of the beach cleanups is Tim Arnold, the organizer of Fight Dirty Tybee. From volunteers to government officials, everyone points to Arnold as the person who knows the most about trash on Tybee Island.

Covering different swathes of the beach at a time with anywhere from 20 to 50 volunteers, Arnold said they can pick up thousands of pieces of litter in just an hour or so. Eight years and running, Fight Dirty Tybee has been a way for locals, visitors, Girl Scout Troops and beyond to get hands-on in the battle against beach pollution.

Arnold said the cleanups are a way to bring recognition to the problem and inspire change, even if returning to a re-dirtied beach every week can feel like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill over and over.

"The harder part is to try to get at the root cause," Arnold said.

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Beach smoking ban produces results

Fight Dirty Tybee has been working its offensive wing this year — Arnold said they got tired of always playing "goalie" keeping the trash from entering the water — and has made some big wins with its Smoke Free Beach ordinance.

Implemented on July 1 this year, the law makes Tybee's beaches smoke free, meaning cigarettes can't be smoked starting on the raised boardwalks headed to the beach. In the last months, Arnold said Fight Dirty Tybee has counted up its collected cigarette butts and found a 75% reduction in the beach's most pervasive piece of litter.

Where the volunteers used to pick up 3,000 to 6,000 cigarette butts in a cleanup, they're only getting a couple hundred to around a thousand at most.

Far and away the second biggest beach litter offender, according to Arnold, is drinking straws. With many local businesses serving up drinks right at the beachfront, it's common for beachgoers to bring a beverage down with them and to leave the evidence behind.

But Arnold said 10 of the 20 or so beachfront restaurants have enrolled in the organization's voluntary "Turtle Friendly Restaurant" program in which establishments commit to finding alternatives to plastic take-out bags, plastic straws and Styrofoam.

The mixture of code-enforced rules and voluntary opt-ins is a two-pronged way Arnold's organization has been able to tackle pollution before it gets to the beaches. He said that a major partner in these efforts has been in the city's code enforcement office.

Tybee code enforcers crack down on litterbugs

There has been more enforcement of littering rules this year than before, said Sgt. Walter Hattrick from Tybee's code enforcement office. They've issued 81 citations for violations of the Smoke Free Beach ordinance since July 1, and they've given 61 citations January 1 through early September for littering, on track to be fewer than the 164 littering citations the code enforcement officers issued in 2021.

Littering is harder to enforce because it's hard to prove, Hattrick said. Unless litterers are caught in the act, litter is often found once it's been left on the beach and the offenders are gone. But overall, the littering citations have been fewer this year due to the city's push to increase education as well as nice, new signs at the boardwalk crossovers stating the beach rules.

"We educate a new crowd of people every weekend," Hattrick said. Education about the rules — like no glass, dogs or cigarettes on the beach — will always be ongoing efforts since there's always new faces on the beach.

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His office has also been working to get some of the bigger pieces of junk off the island through the beach borrow box program, where visitors can place toys and other beach items they don't plan to take with them in boxes set as the end of the boardwalks. This way, Hattrick said, those items are finding their ways off the beaches and can be reused.

The enforcement department on Tybee Island is still relatively new: Mayor Shirley Sessions said the department was only created in 2021, and before that the police department was in charge of enforcing everything from litter regulations to keeping people out of the dunes. Now, there are eight full-time, year-round employees dedicated to enforcing code compliance.

"They of course do write citations, but they also spend a lot of time educating visitors, especially on the commercial end of the south end about the common beach rules," Sessions said.

"I'm a big believer that when people visit a place that's clean and neat they tend to be more aware of themselves and follow through," Sessions said, and she believes the island is becoming more rich every year in people who care about maintaining the cleanliness and beauty of Tybee's beaches.

Marisa Mecke is an environmental journalist. She can be reached at mmecke@gannett.com or by phone at (912) 328-4411. 

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Tybee leaders fight beach litter, cigarettes, pollution