Pigs.........

Visitors left 8,000 pounds of trash on Tahoe beaches July 4

Another holiday, another record-breaking amount of holiday trash

Suzie Dundas

Careless and lawbreaking visitors to Lake Tahoe’s beaches left more than 8,000 pounds of trash behind July 4 — more than twice as much as last year. The shocking figure reveals the growing negative impact tourism is continuing to wreak on the fragile alpine ecosystem. 

In just three hours on July 5, volunteers with the League to Save Lake Tahoe collected 8,559 pounds of litter left behind by Fourth of July celebrants on Tahoe beaches and beach parking lots. It’s the most trash ever left behind by a large margin, with 3,450 pounds collected in 2022 and 1,456 in 2021 — a staggering increase of 2.5 times as much from the previous year. To date, beach cleanups in the Tahoe area have produced more than 70,000 pounds of trash, including more than 212,000 cigarette butts and 27,000 plastic bottle caps. 

While beaches with trash cans and restroom facilities were relatively trash-free, including Kings Beach and Commons Beach on the north shore, undeveloped beaches fared much worse. More than 6,200 pounds of trash were pulled from Zephyr Shoals alone, the League to Save Lake Tahoe’s news release noted. Zephyr Shoals is just north of Zephyr Cove Resort, making it a popular place for beachgoers to avoid the access fees and alcohol bans of nearby public beaches closer to Stateline and South Lake Tahoe.

“[It] looked like a landfill,” said League to Save Lake Tahoe CEO Darcie Goodman Collins of Zephyr Shoals in the news release.

Trash left behind in 2023 included not just food wrappers and beer cans but also inflatable rafts, broken beach chairs, tents, Birkenstock sandals and running shoes, 8-foot-long folding tables, full-sized plastic coolers, and even barbecue grills. Heartbreaking photos released by the League to Save Lake Tahoe show geese shuffling through the trash on the early morning of July 5, as well as teenage volunteers dragging bags of trash as large as they are away from the shoreline. 

This is the 10th year of the “Keep Tahoe Red, White & Blue” beach cleanup, organized by the League to Save Lake Tahoe and supported by organizations like the U.S. Forest Service, area ski resorts and businesses like Stio Mountain Studio in Heavenly Village. Trash was collected by hundreds of volunteers both on land and below the surface of the lake, as well as by “BeBot,” an all-electric, golf-car-sized robot that can remove microplastics and small items like cigarette butts from the sand. 

“Because the Lake Tahoe Basin behaves like a giant granite funnel,” reads the League to Save Lake Tahoe news release, “any trash left behind will move downhill and into the Lake’s blue waters.” In 2023, Lake Tahoe’s clarity improved after 40 years of declining health, and area organizations have formed regional agencies focused on environmental stewardship, among other rallying cries. 

“Unless each of us share in the responsibility for protecting this place,” Collins says, “it could be ruined.”