11 Million Pieces of Litter Picked Up in Under 24 Hours

In less than one day, nearly 400,000 volunteers in 104 countries found and collected 11,439,086 items of litter from beaches and waterways.

The garbage cleanup was part of the Ocean Conservancy’s annual Coastal Cleanup. Information about the types of garbage found during the cleanup was compiled into a report that will help planners to understand and address the problem of litter.

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For instance, certain pieces of litter were more common than others in various countries: 11,077 diapers in the Philippines, 19,504 fishing nets in the United Kingdom, and 1,362,741 cigarette butts in the US. Of the 43 most common items tracked in the cleanup, cigarette butts, plastic bags and food wrappers or containers were the three most often found.

The report points to shoreline and recreational activities as the single biggest source of garbage in almost every area of the world. In Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Southeast Asia over 70% of the litter was from food packages, drink bottles and other items that suggested recreational activity. Smoking related activities came in as the second biggest source of litter, accounting for over 30% of the items found worldwide.

When weighed, the garbage collected totalled 6.8 million pounds (3 million kg). That’s the weight equivalent of 453 large adult male elephants, and it’s all litter that was prevented from reaching the sea.

Image credit: weegeebored via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

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