With more than 71 sites countywide – including four in Coconut Grove – the annual event set a record for most participants and most trash collected.
Knee-deep in a mangrove forest, Len Scinto worked for an hour to untangle an inflatable life raft and several feet of rope – the type of debris known to kill large marine animals – that was caught in a complex web of mangrove roots.
Nearby, on the shore of Clarington Island, just off Coconut Grove’s Dinner Key, community members of all ages sifted through the sand to remove thousands of pieces of plastic, clearing out a total of 496 pounds of trash in just two hours.
Last Saturday’s cleanup – one of 71 held throughout Miami-Dade – was part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup Day, the world’s largest single-day ocean cleanup event. Across Miami, more than 3,600 volunteers collected about 25,000 pounds of marine debris and plastic pollution, joining hundreds of thousands of others across the world.
In addition to the City of Miami-owned Clarington Island, other collection sites in Coconut Grove included Kennedy Park, Peacock Park and Vizcaya.
“It was really sobering to go out there,” said Lauren Amos, a Florida International University law student who joined in the cleanup on Clarington Island. “You don’t really think about where your trash goes after you throw it away. Out of sight, out of mind, right? But it all goes somewhere. This was a really good reminder of that.”
Miami hosts one of the largest county-wide cleanup efforts in the country, rivaled only by San Francisco and Los Angeles. It has more than doubled in size since it was taken over by VolunteerCleanup.org, a group founded by local Biscayne Bay-loving couple Dave Doebler and Dara Schoenwald. This year’s event boasted the largest ever number of individual cleanup sites in Miami-Dade.
“It’s not about having 71 cleanups that’s so impressive to me,” said Doebler. “It’s that we have 71 nonprofits, community organizers and individuals who are actually leading the cleanups, not just today, but every day.”
The 2024 cleanup marks the 10th anniversary of VolunteerCleanup.org’s local involvement in the worldwide event. In the early 2010s, Doebler recalls, he and Schoenwald noticed an abundance of floating trash during their paddleboard trips throughout the Bay.
In their spare time the pair began organizing impromptu cleanups with friends. They quickly discovered how eager Miamians were to participate, but that there was no platform to coordinate volunteers.
Doebler says they set out to not only make cleanups more accessible, but to increase their frequency. “You’ve never appreciated it, you’ve never seen it, you’ve never participated in it. So how can you love what you’ve never seen?” he said.
This year, they’ve asked site leaders to host three additional cleanups, with the goal of increasing volunteer participation.
“Our entire purpose is to create a community where cleanups are constantly going on, building a groundswell of advocacy. And through that advocacy, and through that community, you have individuals taking action, whether it’s showing up in county commission [meetings], asking questions of politicians who want their vote, or talking to the business owners of their favorite restaurant,” Doebler said.
For many first-time volunteers, a cleanup is an eye-opening experience.
Twenty-one-year-old Laura Castro-Sandoval and her two younger brothers came out on Saturday not sure what to expect.
“Seeing it on Instagram you’re like, ‘oh, it’s probably not that bad,’ but actually being here for two hours and picking it up, you realize how much it is,” she said.
Kate Thome, a science teacher at Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart, has volunteered for International Coastal Cleanup Day since 1992 when she helped clean beaches in Singapore. For years she has encouraged her students here in Miami to attend local cleanups and this year about a dozen signed up.
“It’s pretty sad to think that we’re still doing this. But these long term, sustained efforts have great benefits,” Thome said.
Years ago, Thome explained, cigarette butts were the number one item picked up globally. On Saturday she held one up, pleased that it was the only one her students found on the island.
Cigarette bans within public parks and beaches, which a number of South Florida municipalities have passed in recent years, are having an impact, Doebler says. He believes the cleanups have increased public awareness of both marine and land-based litter, which in turn has driven new polices to address the problem. “We’re a stepping stone into environmentalism,” he said.
Since beginning VolunterCleanup.org, Doebler has become more involved in policymaking, holding a seat on the Biscayne Bay Watershed Management Advisory Board and co-chairing the Biscayne Bay Marine Health Coalition.
“We are now a voting bloc, you know, we’re our own demographic of people who care about Biscayne Bay,” he said.
Despite the massive volunteer efforts and increase in awareness, there is no shortage of trash polluting Miami’s waterways. Plastics, Doebler notes, has emerged as the single greatest type of pollution. Bottle caps and small pieces of plastics were the most collected item at this year’s cleanup.
Scinto, a biogeochemist and Chairman of the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, applauds the volunteers who turn up each year to collect trash but says a real impact will occur when people rethink and reevaluate their relationship to disposable materials like plastics and other forms of pollution.
“We just have to figure out that we are wholly part of the environment. It is not something that we can separate from ourselves,” Scinto says. “We are contained within the environment, and so it’s not just about doing coastal cleanups. It’s realizing our place in the world and our responsibilities to it.”
