On a cloudy morning in Senegal, surfer Babacar Thiaw paddled through a sea of plastic. That day, he was the only local in the lineup at his home surf spot of Virage on the coast of Dakar, where his father first opened a surf shack in the 1970s. As he marveled at the barreling brown waves riddled with trash—and travelers—it hit him: “They’re just here for fun and will leave, but I’ll be here forever,” he thought. “Am I going to be condemned to live in this environment for the rest of my life?” Fast-forward more than a decade, and you’ll now find Thiaw making his own waves as the owner of Copacabana Surf Village, a surf shop, zero-waste restaurant, and a hub for sustainability initiatives like beach clean-ups and youth surf camps with an eco lean.
Thiaw is part of an increasingly urgent surfer-led movement to protect the world’s oceans. In 2020, he founded the Senegal chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a group of eco-conscious surfers that first formed in Malibu, California, in 1984 but has grown dramatically over the past decade. Surfers have long seen themselves as stewards of the ocean: After all, more than 75% of the world’s surf breaks are located in biodiverse ecosystems, giving millions of surfers worldwide a front-row seat to nature, and the growing impact humans are having on it. But with each passing year, new initiatives are tapping into this knowledge to raise awareness, track environmental changes, and shift policy. After all: Who wants to surf through piles of garbage?
“There is a long history of surfers being the first to ring the alarm of environmental damages to coastal habitats and that strong stewardship ethic continues today,” says Emmett Balassone, communications coordinator at Save The Waves Coalition. “Surfers may be the first to witness coral bleaching, sick seabirds or marine mammals, water quality changes like algae blooms, and other environmental issues like plastic pollution.”
Coinciding with the UN’s Ocean Decade, a plan to manage oceans sustainably by 2030, there’s been a call to more formally protect beloved surf spots with a multi-pronged approach. The obvious place to start is with pervasive environmental threats, like trash—which can be especially complicated to control, considering the movement of tides. In Indonesia, the second-biggest contributor of marine plastic after China, the sight of plastic bottles and straws while catching waves at Batu Bolong is not uncommon—much like what Thiaw dealt with in Dakar. While it can be hard to pinpoint where the trash is coming from, some of it flows into the ocean from Bali’s waterways. Local environmental organizations there, like Sungai Watch, are focused on tackling trash closer to the source via the world’s rivers, which according to some estimates, receive 5.8 million tons of plastic per year. Founded in 2020 by Gary, Kelly, and Sam Bencheghib, three siblings who grew up surfing and going to the beach in Seminyak, Bali, the nonprofit aims to reduce the flow of pollution into the ocean by installing waste-capturing river barriers and organizing community clean-ups. As of 2024, its team of “river warriors”—a mix of locals and volunteers from around the world—has collected over 5 million pounds of plastic, according to their website. Sungai Watch is now expanding throughout Java, Indonesia, home to 90 of the world’s 1,000 most polluted rivers.
In 2024, the siblings launched Sungai Design, a studio that creates furniture from recycled plastic, with profits going toward supporting Sungai Watch. Its sleek Ombak chair (which means “wave” in Indonesian) is made entirely of plastic bags, the number one waste category that the team collects. “As our sorting facilities started filling up with mountains of different waste types, we had to come up with innovative ways to recycle materials that weren’t being recycled in Indonesia,” says Kelly Bencheghib, who still lives in Bali.
Others are zooming out. The Save the Waves Coalition, a nonprofit working to defend surf ecosystems, has made strides by establishing 12 World Surfing Reserves (WSRs) in the United States, Mexico, Australia, Costa Rica, Portugal, and elsewhere, creating areas that are actively protected by local partners. In many of these reserves, efforts include protecting the integrity of the wave itself, and the economic value it brings to a community by way of surf tourism.
