Global volunteers collect 1.3 million plastic bottles in one-day waterway cleanup

Around 630,000 volunteers removed almost 13.9 million pieces of rubbish from beaches, rivers and waterways during the 2025 International Coastal Cleanup, the world’s largest single-day volunteer ocean cleanup. Their work covered more than 15,000 miles of coastline and waterways on every continent.

Plastic drink bottles were the most frequently recorded item, with 1,338,712 collected. Volunteers also retrieved nearly 1.2 million cigarette butts, many of which contain plastic filters, along with about 886,000 bottle caps, 581,000 plastic shopping bags and more than one million other plastic bags and food containers. In total, the cleanup removed about 3.6 million kilograms of waste.

The annual effort has grown substantially since 2,800 people took part in the first cleanup on the Texas Gulf Coast 40 years ago. Since then, nearly 19.7 million participants across 166 countries and territories have collected more than 439 million items weighing 184,000 tonnes.

The initiative also creates a long-running record of marine litter. Its findings have been used in nearly 300 peer-reviewed studies and to evaluate waste policies. One study published in 2025 found that plastic-bag bans and charges reduced bags as a share of shoreline litter by 25% to 47% compared with places without those measures.