Grocery Stores

Clean Water Action, a national group, identified fast food restaurants and convenience stores as the top contributors of the types of trash they could identify in the streets of San Jose, South San Francisco, Richmond and Oakland. Street trash often ends up in the bay.

The results shed light on where cities should concentrate their efforts as they race to comply with a strict regional directive to end all trash pollution to the bay by 2022, said Miriam Gordon, California director for Clean Water Action.

"If we're going to solve the problem of trash entering our waterways, we need to know where it's being created. Part of the problem is we have so much trash to deal with in the first place," Gordon said.

Volunteers with Clean Water Action's "Taking Out the Trash" program picked through hundreds of pieces of litter at six different street sites three times to determine where the trash was coming from. Nineteen percent of trash was branded, and the leading sources of that trash were McDonald's, Burger King, 7-Eleven, Starbucks, Wendy's, Taco Bell and Walgreens.

Napkins, snack food wrappers, receipts, cellophane, straws and bottle caps were among the top items of roughly 55 types of trash in the streets. Sixty-eight percent of it was used for food or beverage packaging.

In the Bay Area, trash tossed into the street usually ends up in the bay after being blown into urban creeks or pushed into storm drains by heavy winter rains. Hundreds of tons of trash end up in the bay each year.

Worldwide, more than 80 percent of marine debris comes from land-based sources such as urban stormwater, according to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.

The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board had those numbers in mind when it adopted a controversial stormwater permit program in 2009 that required cities to reduce their trash load to the bay 40 percent by 2014, 70 percent by 2017 and 100 percent by 2022.

The water board left it up to cities to decide how to tackle the problem, and that's where the rules have run into trouble. Cities have begun installing storm drain trash-capture devices, but the price tag stretches into the millions, and there are no long-term state or federal funds set aside to assist them.

Most of the cities in San Mateo and Alameda counties have appealed the water board's trash reduction permit to a statewide commission that rules on unfunded state mandates, arguing that the new rules go beyond the obligations of the federal Clean Water Act.

"It's not that we disagree with the requirements, it's just to help us with the fact that we don't have the funding for it," said Matt Fabry, program coordinator for the San Mateo Countywide Water Pollution Prevention Program.

San Jose officials estimate they've spent more than $2 million installing trash-capture devices since 2008, enough to account for trash produced by 895 acres of commercial and retail stores within city limits.

The city is developing a plan to reduce its trash load to urban creeks 40 percent by 2014, according to Elaine Marshall, head of San Jose's Stormwater Management Program.

Gordon, of Clean Water Action, said it would be far less costly to target the fast food restaurants, convenience stores and grocery stores that are giving paper, napkins, plastic utensils and Styrofoam cups away by the fistful.

The good news is that, according to the survey, reusable containers could replace 66 percent of drink packaging and 39 percent of food packaging.