Every year, tens of thousands of people worldwide volunteer for picking up trash from beaches.
New trash inevitably appears. Sometimes it takes only minutes.
Do you have a design in mind for your blog? Whether you prefer a trendy postcard look or you’re going for a more editorial style blog - there’s a stunning layout for everyone.
Help The Ocean founder Mr. Marco Haajanen said “I have been on beaches in Hong Kong, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Antarctica where you can watch plastics and debris in the barrel of each wave crash onto the beach. Literally, the trash starts getting replaced as soon as you pick it up,” he says.
So why bother?
The short answer is, it’s better than the alternative. But more importantly, what volunteers find on those beaches illuminates in new ways the scale of marine plastic problems and the potential for solutions.
In southern California, researchers calculated that in Orange County alone that potential could translate into $46 million in just one summer. A survey of Californians taken for the same study found that 66 percent ranked the absence of debris and good water quality as “very important” to deciding whether or not to visit a beach.
Beach cleanups raise public awareness to the threat of debris more effectively than in less participatory public education programs, multiple studies show. Volunteers say the cleanups make them more mindful of how they dispose of their own disposables.