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Meet the San Francisco man with the within grime on metropolis’s famously filthy streets

Vincent Yuen likes to talk trash.

He walks around the city every day, picking it up. He keeps trash logs, documenting how much he found and where. He peppers his conversation with words like “garbology,” the study of garbage. His wife calls trash his greatest passion.

Lucky for Yuen, he lives in San Francisco, a filthy city that offers him a case study on just about every sidewalk. Lucky for San Francisco, Yuen is determined to see our city sparkle.

Yuen is the founder of Refuse Refuse — meaning reject trash — which has gone from a one-man cleanup operation outside his Inner Richmond home to a citywide effort, attracting legions of volunteers with their plastic bags and garbage pickers. Since its founding in March 2021, Refuse Refuse has collected 58,136 gallons of garbage.

I added a few more gallons to the tally Sunday in a cleanup of North Beach. Yuen tweeted a few months ago that he’d love former Giants star Hunter Pence; his wife, Lexi Pence; chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub; and me to join him.

After schedule conflicts and rain delays, we finally pitched in along with scores of other volunteers organized by Together SF, a civic engagement and volunteering group that helps Refuse Refuse coordinate its events. Before we picked up garbage, I asked Pence — known as the Reverend for his inspiring locker-room sermons — for a 2022 pep talk as the pandemic slogs on.

“’Finding Nemo’ is our mantra — just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” he said. “Pick up trash, plant trees, love on each other, be kind. We’ve just got to keep doing the best we can with what we’ve got.”

Yuen gave the crowd some tips before we started. Namely, stick to beginner trash and leave the needles, feces and dead animals to the professionals. On that cheerful note, we set out.

Former Giants right fielder Hunter Pence works with other volunteers during a community trash cleanup in North Beach and Chinatown organized by Refuse Refuse.

Bronte Wittpenn/The Chronicle

It turns out you notice new things about your city when your eyes are trained on the ground. For example, despite seeing very few cigarette smokers this day, San Francisco is blanketed in cigarette butts.

Yuen said they compose 35% of the garbage he finds citywide and even more in some neighborhoods. He said Hayes Valley is the No. 1 neighborhood when it comes to butts; there, they make up 60% of litter.

Other often-spotted pieces of litter on Sunday were disposable masks, coffee cups and their cardboard sleeves, candy wrappers, chip bags, banana peels and napkins. One-offs included a thank you card, a windshield wiper and a coconut with a straw in it.

Yuen said the biggest problem when it comes to trash is single-use products that companies churn out endlessly and that consumers use mindlessly and toss away — too often on the ground.

Ineffective city trash cans and their pallet number are another factor, he said. They’re easily broken and rifled through, spilling trash around them. In the city’s endless saga of building a new and improved city can, the manufacturing firm charged with making the prototypes should have them placed for testing on city streets in June, according to a spokesperson with Public Works.

In addition to lackluster city bins, another culprit in San Francisco is the wind that grabs trash, including from overstuffed, unlocked household bins, and sends it flying. Yuen said he’s found far more trash on the western sides of streets than the eastern sides because of wind patterns. The dirtiest street in the city, he said, is Brighton Avenue in the Ingleside neighborhood, which sits in a wind tunnel.

“It doesn’t help they have a McDonald’s on one end and a liquor store on the other,” he said.

Overall, though, Yuen said the dirtiest neighborhoods are the usual suspects: the Tenderloin, South of Market and the Mission. He said the homeless population does add to the city’s trash problem, but that they’re unfairly blamed for having an outsized role in the matter. Instead, he said, people of all income levels in all neighborhoods are responsible for our dirty city.

Volunteers clean up North Beach during a community effort organized by Refuse Refuse.

Volunteers clean up North Beach during a community effort organized by Refuse Refuse.

Bronte Wittpenn/The Chronicle

Yuen’s garbage fascination is a new development. So is his commitment to community service and his devotion to San Francisco despite living here since 2003. The 40-year-old Pasadena native worked as a self-employed sales consultant for years and saved enough money to take time off during the pandemic. His wife, Megan Yuen, works as a director of account operations for a retail consultant.

In seeking out safe, outdoor activities for his daughters, aged 5 and 7, he turned to picking up trash outside their inner Richmond home each day. Slowly, the block grew so clean, their trash walks got longer. Neighbors spotted them and joined, and their area grew notably cleaner. A post about his efforts on Nextdoor took off, and still more people tagged along.

In March 2021, he formalized the effort, though Refuse Refuse is just a community service group with a website. It’s not a nonprofit, and he accepts no donations. He is making $35,000 through a six-month contract with Together SF and Shine On SF, another new civic group committed to cleaning the city’s streets.

After a few hours of picking up trash with Yuen, I felt tired but satisfied. There aren’t very many civic problems in San Francisco that you can tackle on your own and see an immediate difference. I’ll certainly participate in more cleanups this year, and you can, too, at refuserefusesf.org.

Yuen doesn’t know what comes next. Friends have urged him to enter politics, but he’s not convinced he could make more change at City Hall than he can with his trash picker. So he’ll keep at it until one day, he hopes San Francisco’s reputation shifts from being dirty to pristine. He figures he owes it to the city.

“I have not been a very civically engaged person,” Yuen admitted. “I really haven’t done much for my city. I couldn’t name the supervisor of my district if my life depended on it until recently.

“I’m a homeowner in San Francisco, which elevates me to the top 1% of the world. Talk about privilege,” he said. “It only took a global pandemic to shake my head loose.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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