Plastic outranks cigarette butts as top coastal trash

The International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) revealed that 4.772 million pieces of food wrappers were picked up across 116 countries in a single day in 2019, displacing cigarette butts (4.2 million) as the top item collected for the first time in ICC history.

Organized by environmental group Ocean Conservancy, the coastal cleanup gathered 943,195 volunteers around the globe and collected nearly 32.5 million pieces of trash, composed mostly of plastic material such as beverage bottles (1.9 million), bottle caps (1.5 million), and straws and stirrers (942,992).