Editor’s Note: Writer Carolina Drake participated in the Love is in the Grove cleanup event at Kennedy Park on February 13 with her 2-year-old daughter. She wrote about the experience for the Coconut Grove Spotlight.
Amanda Di Perna, 22, program manager at Debris Free Oceans, is addressing a handful of volunteers gathered at Kennedy Park ready to work.
“There are seventeen hundred times more pieces of plastics in the ocean than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy,” she explains to the group.
As she speaks, an eight-year-old boy puts on his gloves. A Girl Scout and her mother nod, each holding a trash picker stick and a bucket, while a nine-year-old boy decides to get a head-start toward the mangrove shoreline to fill up his orange bucket.
The quest for the afternoon is to pick up as much trash as possible.
With 80 percent of plastic in the ocean comes from the land, Di Perna says, the effect is “like a garbage truck with plastic entering the ocean every single minute.”
Debris Free Oceans, a Miami-based nonprofit that promotes policy initiatives to reduce ocean pollution, also organizes coastal cleanup events. Today, the organization is focused on a stretch of mangrove-rimmed coastline within one of Coconut Grove’s most scenic public parks.
“The Boy Scout group is coming at five,” says their leader, who arrives first and lets the group know that more helpers are on their way.
The waste crisis is a rising concern.
“In Miami, we are particularly trashy,” says Di Perna, noting that Miami-Dade residents produce roughly 11 pounds of trash per capita daily, more than twice the national average. “The crisis has various causes: tourism, take-out culture, construction waste, outdated stormwater systems, and a lack of public awareness.
At the park, Maddie, 8, a veteran who has been attending cleanup events since she was 7, focuses on finding the smaller pieces: tiny fragments of old plastic bags, cigarette butts, a broken plastic ball left behind.
“I feel OK cleaning up people’s trash, but they should not litter the environment everyone shares,” she offers.
Her mother, Zully Silva, who manages Block-by-Block, a cleanup program for public spaces, highlights how Maddie looks forward to these events. “Whenever we go to a park and it’s littered, she always asks me why people leave so much trash behind.”
Debris Free Oceans’ cleanup events run the gamut – in parks, on the beach, and even underwater with snorkeling and scuba gear. The nonprofit also organizes pub crawls and singles trash-picking events. Today’s event – titled “Love is in the Grove” – took place the day before Valentine’s Day.
For Di Perna, who studied marine biology at Florida State University, advocating for marine life means making waste reduction her life mission, which she is doing by working with this ten-year-old organization that empowers communities in Miami-Dade to generate less waste.
A cleanup, of course, is just a Band-Aid to the waste crisis. A better solution, Di Perna explains, are steps to reduce our production of waste – especially the kind that finds its way into the buckets of the volunteers assembled here to clean up the Grove shoreline.
Emma, 11, who learned from her teacher that about 1 billion plastic bottles are used across the globe each minute of each day, set out to remove at least some of them from the park.
“I feel great that I just picked up a bunch of this trash and am happy I’m helping the ecosystem,” she says, noting how much of the trash contained plastic.
“I also found this weird anchor made with Styrofoam,” she added.
At the event’s conclusion Emma hands her bucket to Di Perna. It contains 7.73 pounds of trash. “The record for the day!” Di Perna announces.
All of the volunteers’ buckets will be weighed and added to a database that is shared with policy officials at the city, county, and state levels.
According to a 2023 study by Florida International University researchers, the state is the nation’s third-highest generator of plastic waste. Additionally, Florida remains among 19 states that have placed restrictions on regulating plastic carryout bags.
“Basically, Florida has bans against banning plastic,” Di Perna explains.
Florida recycles only eight percent of its solid waste, and currently, Miami’s City Commission is deciding whether to suspend its recycling program altogether.
These worrisome facts don’t seem to discourage the kids. For David, 9, another first-timer, “It felt amazing just cleaning up and knowing the trees and the birds are much safer now.”
In 20 minutes, David picks up two and a half pounds of trash.
“People should be more mindful and careful when they throw their stuff because they could endanger the environment,” he observes. “Clean up your trash, and if you drop something, pick it back up. It’s not that hard.”
After realizing he could continue picking up trash to his heart’s content, David grabs a second bucket and embarks towards the mangroves on his mission.
“This time, I’m going out to get four pounds!”
