More than 1.3m plastic bottles were collected from beaches, rivers and waterways last year during the world’s largest single-day volunteer ocean cleanup.
About 630,000 people took part in the International Coastal Cleanup in 2025, removing almost 13.9m pieces of rubbish from more than 15,000 miles of coastline and waterways.
Most common items recorded
Plastic bottles were the most commonly recorded item, while more than 1.2m cigarette butts were litter-picked. Volunteers picked up 885,000 plastic bottle caps, 581,000 plastic shopping bags and more than 1m other plastic bags and food containers.
The annual cleanup is organised by the NGO Ocean Conservancy. Its director of plastics policy, Dr Anja Brandon, said: “There’s really no excuse for this – plastic bottles are among the most recyclable items out there, which tells us two important truths: one is that we are making too much plastic, and two is that a lot of our waste isn’t getting where it needs to go.”
Impact on marine wildlife
She added: “Increasing access to recycling, including bottle deposit returns, and investing in reuse and refill infrastructure would go a long way in protecting the ocean from this common type of plastic pollution.”
The findings underline the continuing dominance of disposable plastic in marine litter, despite a growing number of bans and laws intended to curb its use.
UK consumers use an estimated 13bn plastic drinks bottles a year, according to the WWF, with just half of these recycled. After nearly a decade in the waiting, a deposit return scheme for recycling drinks bottles is expected to come into force in 2027, following similar successful schemes in Germany, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland.
Call for government action
Allison Schutes, Ocean Conservancy’s senior director of conservation cleanups, highlighted the impact plastic rubbish had on marine wildlife. “In a recent Ocean Conservancy-led study that quantified the deadliness of plastic to marine life, it found that an albatross was found to have been killed by ingesting an entire plastic bottle,” she said.
“We know these items have real impacts. When these items enter the water, it’s not just an aesthetic concern for local beaches but is a real concern for ocean wildlife.”
Schutes said tackling the problem required governments to reduce the production and consumption of single-use plastics and improve recycling and waste disposal systems.
“These are items that we’re using for only minutes, and there are good replacements,” she said. “We need to make sure that what we do use makes it into an end-of-life system.”
In Ocean Conservancy’s first cleanup 40 years ago, 2,800 volunteers removed rubbish from beaches on the Texas Gulf coast. Since then, almost 19.7 million people in 166 countries and territories have collected more than 439m items weighing a total of 184,000 tonnes.
Plastic drinks bottles are the third most commonly recorded item over the initiative’s history, with almost 27m collected. Volunteers have picked up more than 65m cigarette butts, many of which contain plastic filters, 32m food wrappers and 20m plastic bottle caps.
Ocean Conservancy said the data had been cited in nearly 300 peer-reviewed studies and used to assess whether policies aimed at reducing plastic pollution were working.
One such study published in 2025 found that plastic bag bans and charges reduced bags as a proportion of litter collected on shorelines by between 25% and 47% compared with places without such policies.
