Baynanza 2025 with SeaKeepers, Miami Waterkeeper, and Miami-Dade County

Overview

On April 12th, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with Miami Waterkeeper and Miami-Dade County Parks and Recreation to lead the 43rd annual Baynanza cleanup at the newly opened Maurice Gibb Park as well as Flagler Memorial Island in Miami. The Baynanza event has been a long-running cleanup in South Florida, where everyone from local organizations to the general public are encouraged to attend one of various cleanups at many sites throughout the area. To start our day, we met with our partner organizations at the shore and docks next to Maurice Gibb Memorial Park in downtown Miami, where we checked in our team of 96 volunteers and handed out gloves, pickers, and buckets before starting to board local vessels headed for Flagler Memorial Island. Throughout the rest of the morning, our amazing volunteers explored the island in search of any and all man-made trash, finding the shores inundated with exorbitant amounts of plastic, glass, and wooden debris as well as overflow from the island’s trash cans. Flagler Memorial Island is meant to be under the “Leave No Trace” policy to enforce minimal pollution, so finding not only such high levels of pollution, but trash cans themselves was shocking. By the end of the morning our team of volunteers had collected more than 333 pounds of trash from the island! Removing such massive amounts of trash has massive impacts both for us as well as for native seabirds and the marine species that call Biscayne Bay their home. We are extremely grateful to participate in such monumental collaborative cleanup opportunities, and we offer a huge thanks to Miami-Dade County, Miami Waterkeeper, the teams of all of our local vessels as well as our incredible volunteers for joining us, and we hope to work together again soon.