Beer bottles, food scraps, old furniture, needles, cigarette butts and non-recyclable plastics.
These are some of the things Susana de la Peña and her partner, Daniel Simpson, regularly find during early morning trash cleanups in their Mountain View neighborhood.
“People think we work for the city. That’s like their first thought,” de la Peña said.
“We typically say, like, we're your neighbors, we work for you guys,” Simpson said.
Though the couple has traversed many streets in their neighborhood, they find themselves returning to a block, just east of Interstate 15, that’s home to Mountain View School and a shuttered building that once offered community wraparound services.
They said they’ve been motivated to pick up trash around the local school to protect the youngest members of their community.
“We're picking up, like I said, beer bottles and cigarette butts and just paraphernalia,” said Simpon, as children walked past him toward the school entrance. “It's like, I don't want those kids seeing that because then it ends up affecting or influencing them to do something as an adult.”
They each carry an 80-liter trash bag and, once the bags get too heavy to carry around, they know it’s time to walk home and get ready for work. Most of the trash they collect is disposed of in their own home trash bins, Simpson said. In the past, they have dropped off the rubbish at nearby landfills, he added.
“But that’s like $100 to do that and paying out of pocket was like, 'Hey, I can’t do this all the time,'” he said.
Besides the amount of trash they collect, the type of waste has been an eye-opener for de la Peña.
“It's very important that we start to realize that we waste so much,” she said. “A lot of times, most of the trash that we pick, at least 80% of it is disposable cups and plates and napkins and plastic forks. I just wonder if, instead of having to use so much, we could just start to reuse things we have.”
Cleanups, Simpson added, are also their way of helping prevent more litter from entering waterways.
“We know it’s going to rain, we know it’s going to go down to the water drains,” he said. “So, if we can just pick up the trash now before it ends up in the drain, that’s kind of like the goal.”
During their cleanups, neighbors thank them and drivers honk in support. It’s a good feeling, the couple acknowledged, but they hope their efforts will encourage more people to join them, or better yet, stop littering.
Litter is problematic all across the country. A study released last week showed that litter along roadways and waterways in the U.S. has declined 34% since 2020, meaning that every American’s share of litter fell from 152 pieces to 96. In San Diego, the nonprofit I Love A Clean San Diego and its volunteers collected more than 284,000 pounds of litter across the county in 2025.
Still, the report found, 35 billion pieces remain in all sorts of public spaces in America.
Franklin Coopersmith, deputy director of San Diego’s Environmental Services Department, acknowledged the couple’s cleaning efforts and said the city is aware that “there is absolutely a systemic problem in the city when it comes to illegal dumping and littering.”
The city prioritizes addressing illegal dumping of larger items, such as furniture, appliances and other bulky items abandoned in vacant lots or blocking streets, he said.
“With litter, it’s not that the city doesn’t care or want to do anything, but we have an obligation for what is the greatest public health and safety to address first,” Coopersmith said. “We are driving trash trucks, we are having to pay employees and benefits. What’s going to have the greatest good for the community with limited resources?”
Every year, the city responds to about 60,000 illegal dumping cases across its jurisdiction. The city responds to these cases based on fieldwork by city crews and requests that the public submit via the city’s Get It Done app.
According to the litter report, the declines are driven by several factors, including education that shapes behavior, strong local programs and enforcement. These are efforts the city is focused on expanding and which may benefit communities like Mountain View, Coopersmith said.
For example, the city is piloting a partnership with community groups that organize cleanup events. A litter pickup group in the Kensington-Talmadge area, where the program is being piloted, collects trash and places their bags at a prearranged location. City crews pick up the waste that same day at no cost to the group and dispose of it.
“Since the city does not have dedicated staffing to pick up individual pieces of litter throughout neighborhoods, these partnerships allow community members to focus on the cleanup while the city helps remove and dispose of the collected waste,” Coopersmith said.
The city plans to formalize the process for requesting city assistance so that other community groups, including those in Mountain View, can participate, he said.
Additionally, the city plans to increase the number of public trash containers in Council Districts 4, 8 and 9. Mayor Todd Gloria’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget includes $100,000 to support illegal dumping prevention and enforcement, Coopersmith said.
On that recent morning cleanup, Simpson and de la Peña end up at their favorite spot: a staircase at the back of the school along 36th Street. The stairs were hand-painted at some point.
“It says, like, ‘Change starts here,’” Simpson said. “When it's super dirty and you clean it, it's like, that's such a beautiful thing.”
“This is like a divine moment, right,” he added. “You get here, you're like, this is me. I'm the one starting the change. … If there (were) just a few more people that were spending one hour of their day doing the same thing, how impactful can we be?”
