With the final cleanup in Edmonds completed on October 19, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance and our partnering organizations have wrapped up almost two months of coastal cleanups as part of Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup! Congratulations and thank you to all of the amazing volunteers for the incredible accomplishments of this effort – you rock!
In the Puget Sound region, over 465 volunteers collected and removed 5141 pounds of debris from 15 miles of shoreline. This included over 10,000 cigarette butts, 7179 foam pieces, 978 plastic bottle caps, 508 construction materials, 88 fireworks, 13 tires, an old mattress, and much more! All of this debris will no longer be polluting our waters or harming wildlife in the Sound, so it is truly a great accomplishment.
The International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), created and run by Ocean Conservancy, is the world’s largest volunteer event, with folks from around the world joining together to clean up our oceans. It is also an enormous data collection project, where data from all of the sites is gathered and studied to get a clearer picture of what is going into our oceans and how we can stop it. We’ve submitted all of our data from these 2013 cleanups, and later in 2014 Ocean Conservancy will publish the global results, so stay tuned!
The map below shows all of the different ICC sites in the Puget Sound area:
Thank you again to all of our sponsors, partners, and volunteers! For more photos from the different ICC events, check out our Facebook page as well as our previous blog post.