New Year’s Day 2023 was a beautiful day to be on the beach, especially with so many enthusiastic ocean-lovers ready for a cleanup!
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Jenness Beach on January 1st for this relatively new Blue Ocean Society tradition: kicking off the new year with a beach cleanup.
Together, we collected 1,236 pieces of debris weighing a total of 44 pounds. We found four Hooksett Disks and many nurdles. If you aren’t familiar, nurdles are spherical, often semitransparent pieces of pre-production plastic, which are melted down by manufacturers to create plastic products in the desired shape. Unfortunately, they are sometimes lost to nature instead of reaching their intended destination to be manufactured into products.
All items collected during the cleanup were recorded on data sheets, as is the case with all Blue Ocean Society cleanups. By tallying the items we find, we learn more about the most abundant and problematic items on our beaches and inform further action.
The storm had washed mounds of tangled, wet seaweed ashore, and we knew there was trash of all kinds hidden within. These volunteers were dedicated to sorting through these wet piles to find all of the trash that lay hidden inside.
Sometimes making the ocean a better place means getting your hands dirty, and these volunteers were up to the task!
Interested in joining a cleanup?
We hold a cleanup at Hampton beach on the first Saturday of the month, and many other cleanups throughout the year. Learn more here!
Check out our Adopt A Beach program!
Lead your own cleanup using our guide, the Digital Beach Cleanup Kit.
Read about last year’s First Day Cleanup.
