Texas volunteers began a cleanup 40 years ago; now 1.3m plastic bottles are collected

More than 1.3 million plastic bottles were collected from coastlines and waterways worldwide in a massive volunteer cleanup effort that began 40 years ago with just 2,800 people on the Texas Gulf Coast. The International Coastal Cleanup, organised by Ocean Conservancy, drew about 630,000 volunteers in 2025, who removed nearly 13.9 million pieces of rubbish across more than 15,000 miles of coastline and waterways. Plastic beverage bottles were the most commonly recorded item, with 1,338,712 collected during the campaign, while volunteers also picked up hundreds of thousands of bottle caps, plastic bags and other discarded packaging. What started as a local Texas effort has since become a global movement whose decades of data are helping researchers assess which plastic policies can actually reduce pollution.From a Texas beach to a global movement: How volunteers collected 1.3 million plastic bottlesThe International Coastal Cleanup began in 1986, when 2,800 volunteers came together to remove rubbish from beaches along the Texas Gulf Coast. Four decades later, the initiative has grown into a worldwide effort involving communities in 166 countries and territories. Nearly 20 million pe...