World Ocean Day Celebration Beach Cleanup

Overview

On the morning of June 7th, 2025, the International SeaKeepers Society partnered with our friends at Clean Miami Beach, and ARTSail to host a collaborative cleanup event as part of a celebration in honor of World Ocean Day through Blue Scholars Initiative on Miami Beach. To start our day, our Community Engagement team met with our fellow organizers as well as other participating groups on what to expect for the day as well as set out our cleanup resources including gloves, buckets, and trash pickers. As 76 incredible volunteers began to arrive and check in, we were treated to an open release of two juvenile brown pelicans by professionals from the Miami Seabird station, who had rehabilitated the pelicans following various forms of fishing injuries. Following an introductory talk from Clean Miami Beach and an opportunity to check out art pieces courtesy of ARTSail, our volunteers began to grab materials and spread out about the beachhead in search of any and all trash. As volunteers brought trash back to our gathering site, our team assisted Clean Miami Beach in sorting our findings into major groups including bottle caps, sheet plastics, cigarettes, solid plastics, and many more. In between rounds of cleaning up, the volunteers were able to engage with us as well as the other organizations about volunteering at future events and even earning some free reusable SeaKeepers items. We were especially excited to be joined by several Junior SeaKeepers, including three who were able to present their findings from their year-long Ocean Research Project to all event attendees! As the cleanup came to a close, we worked diligently to finish sorting and weighing all of the trash we collected, yielding a total of more than 181 lbs of trash over just an hour of work. This event and removing this much trash was only made possible thanks to the tireless work of our volunteers and the efforts of all participating organizations, so we give a huge thank you to all of those who attended for kicking off our celebration of World Ocean Day with a bang, and for making this one a year to remember. We look forward to trying to reach new heights next year and we hope to see some of these amazing volunteers at future SeaKeepers events.