International Coastal Cleanup 2022
By Tiffany Kincaid, Keep Martin Beautiful Executive Director
As summer ends, Keep Martin Beautiful, looks ahead to one of our largest and most impactful events of the year: the International Coastal Cleanup. With Keep Martin Beautiful serving as the local coordinator, Martin County residents have participated in this unique, global event for more than 25 years. Volunteers from around the world unite on a single day to remove litter and marine debris from shorelines and waterways. This year’s cleanup will take place at beaches and waterways throughout Martin County on Saturday, September 17 from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Spearheaded globally by the Ocean Conservancy, the International Coastal Cleanup has had a significant impact in the 35+ years since its inception. Since 1986, the event has inspired over 17 million volunteers to take action and collect more than 348 million pounds of trash from around the world. Just last year, hundreds of thousands of volunteers from over 150 countries participated. This is an incredible opportunity for those in our local area to be a part of this global movement.
Our waterways are the lifeblood of our community, and our volunteers are the heart of our organization. It’s their energy and commitment to the International Coastal Cleanup that makes such a tangible difference in our community. We are so thankful for the hard work put forward by our residents to create a more beautiful environment and extend our gratitude to the 900+ volunteers who have already signed up to participate for this year’s cleanup!
We hope you will join us and register online so we can prepare supplies prior to the event and ensure volunteers go the places most in need of attention. After registering, we encourage volunteers to download and use the CleanSwell™ app. It’s a user-friendly app that makes it easy to track litter as its collected and uploads to a global database. The data is used by scientists and professionals from Ocean Conservancy to analyze patterns across the world.
To register for the cleanup, go to keepmartinbeautiful.org/international-coastal-cleanup.
