MIAMI – Yesterday, at Ocean Conservancy’s Miami flagship International Coastal Cleanup, 58 volunteers collected 86 pounds of trash from Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne. The event also celebrated the work of local partners who organized 71 cleanups across Miami-Dade County, removing 25,000 pounds of trash last weekend. At the flagship event, cleanup organizers were awarded certificates and prizes for their efforts, including awards for the most debris removed, most interesting items, most balloons, and “mangrove hero”.

“Cleanups are always important but hurricanes and extreme weather events exacerbate plastic pollution, so it was especially impactful to have volunteers out there today removing trash and debris in the wake of Hurricane Helene. We are thankful to all the volunteers and local organizers who showed up for our ocean today,” said Ocean Conservancy’s Florida Conservation Program Manager Maggie Winchester-Weiler.

At today’s event, volunteers found a wide variety of trash from plastic bottle caps, cigarette butts, and food wrappers to broken beach umbrellas, socks, and a baseball.

Plastic pollution has a disproportionate impact on Miami, as Dade county generates double the amount of trash per capita per day compared with the national average: 10.8lbs of trash per person per day, compared with 5lbs nationally. Furthermore, the location of this cleanup is significant in that Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park was one of the many state parks that had been included in the controversial proposal by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for development. 

Since the first ICC in 1986, over 18 million volunteers have joined local cleanup efforts big and small to remove over 385 million pounds of trash from beaches and waterways around the globe. At last year’s ICC, over 486,000 volunteers collected nearly 8 million pounds of trash globally, including nearly 2 million cigarette butts, over 1.3 million beverage bottles, and over 850,000 bottle caps. Ocean Conservancy is expecting an even larger turnout in 2024.

Every year, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic waste are estimated to enter the ocean, impacting more than 1,300 species of marine life, including seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals. Plastics never fully break down in the environment but rather break up into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. Microplastics are being found everywhere scientists look, from the depths of the Mariana trench to mountain tops, and even our dinner plates, showing up in animal and vegetable proteins alike, salt, and even drinking water.

In addition to the direct benefit of removing trash from the environment, the data collected by ICC volunteers using the Clean Swell app or data sheets contributes to Ocean Conservancy’s marine litter database. This database is the world’s largest repository of marine debris data and is used to inform scientists, conservation groups, governments, and industry leaders about ocean trash to support plastic pollution prevention and advocacy efforts. ICC data has been instrumental in spurring policy change in Florida like being used to promote the Florida balloon release ban and the smoking ban on Miami beaches, as well as other national and international policies like the Farewell to Foam Act and the  upcoming U.N. plastics treaty.

Photos, b-roll and interviews from today’s cleanup can be found HERE.

The International Coastal Cleanup media kit with photos, b-roll and data can be found HERE.

You can find a two pager with toplines from the 2023 ICC data HERE.

You can find the full 2023 ICC report HERE.

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