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★Mark us as a preferred sourceThe International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) turned forty in 2025, and Ocean Conservancy’s newly released report shows the anniversary season produced its clearest picture yet of the ocean litter problem. During the 2025 International Coastal Cleanup, 630,069 volunteers collected 13,861,048 individual items from shorelines and waterways worldwide — more than 3,586 tonnes in total, across 24,364 kilometres.
The numbers matter, but the real value of the ICC is not the volume of trash removed. It is that for forty years volunteers have recorded what they find, item by item and type by type. That practice built the world’s longest publicly available marine debris dataset — and that dataset has produced laws.
What the 2025 International Coastal Cleanup Numbers Show
The global 2025 totals:
- 630,069 volunteers
- 13,861,048 items collected
- 3,586,528 kg (7.9 million pounds) — roughly the weight of 545 school buses
- 24,364 km (15,142 miles) of shoreline and waterway covered
The ten most common items in 2025:
- Plastic beverage bottles — 1,338,712
- Cigarette butts — 1,197,920
- Plastic bottle caps — 885,854
- Beverage cans — 840,046
- Food wrappers (candy, chips, etc.) — 809,645
- Plastic grocery bags — 581,408
- Other plastic bags — 562,077
- Plastic food containers — 513,745
- Plastic straws and stirrers — 445,383
- Paper cups and plates — 416,420
On top of that, volunteers logged 1,340,349 pieces of plastic and foam smaller than 2.5 centimetres — fragments that can no longer be traced back to any specific product. The list mirrors exactly what waste professionals see on land: most of the problem is single-use, low-value, easily scattered packaging.
Four Decades in Numbers
The ICC has been collecting data since 1986. The forty-year totals:
- 439,194,964 items
- 19,680,511 volunteers
- 928,683 km (577,058 miles) of shoreline and waterway
- 183.9 million kg (405.6 million pounds) of debris removed
- 166 countries and territories
The single most frequently recorded object across four decades is the cigarette butt: 65,632,086 of them. Food wrappers follow (32.5 million), then plastic bottles (27 million), caps (20.5 million) and straws (16.3 million). Nearly 110 million pieces of plastic, foam and glass under 2.5 cm have been logged.
Some less expected entries from the same database: 995,458 tyres, 190,804 appliances and large electronics (refrigerators, washing machines, televisions), and 11.48 million fishing-related items — including 4.2 million metres of rope and 2.2 million metres of fishing line. Disposable masks and gloves alone account for 536,729 items in just the last five years.
Where It Started: A Texas Beach, September 1986
On the third Saturday of September 1986, 2,800 volunteers gathered along the Gulf Coast in Texas and removed 124 tons (273,373 pounds) of trash. The organisers, Linda Maraniss and Kathy O’Hara, worked at the Center for Environmental Education.
Their decisive idea was not the cleanup itself but the data card. They designed a form on which volunteers recorded not only how much they found, but what kind of item it was. From the first year onward it was visible that plastic dominated the debris — and that finding could be shown to journalists, to the U.S. Navy, and to shipping and fishing companies.
Within three years participation had grown twenty-fold, with events in more than 25 U.S. states plus Mexico and Canada. That is when the event was renamed the International Coastal Cleanup.
Why Counting the Trash Changes Everything
This is the report’s central lesson for practitioners. Item-level data, gathered with a consistent method over decades, becomes regulatory evidence. Concrete examples from the report:
- In the late 1980s, ICC data supplied some of the first solid evidence that plastic was a major ocean threat, contributing to MARPOL Annex V’s restrictions on plastic discharge from ships.
- Thirty pounds of balloon litter collected on Assateague Island was traced back to 52 release sources across six U.S. states — evidence that helped shape Virginia’s 1991 ban on mass balloon releases.
- Kenya introduced one of the world’s strictest bag bans in 2017. Before implementation, volunteers there were finding upwards of 30 plastic bags each; by 2025 that figure was down to 7.5 bags per volunteer.
- In Hong Kong, after the 2009 plastic bag levy, the local partner organisation’s own data showed bags dropping out of the most frequently recorded items.
- A 2025 peer-reviewed study built on ICC data found that bag bans and fees reduced plastic bags as a share of collected items by 25 to 47 percent where they were implemented.
- Cigarette butts are now addressed by more than 1,200 U.S. city or municipal rules, such as smoke-free beaches.
- Analysis of expanded polystyrene led to a federal bill and eventually to passage of the Farewell to Foam Act; by 2026, 13 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. had phased out foam foodware.
ICC data have now been cited in close to 300 peer-reviewed articles, 163 of them in the last five years. Ghana became the first country to integrate existing citizen-science data — largely ICC data — into its official UN Sustainable Development Goal reporting on shoreline plastic debris density.
One study is particularly striking: between 2020 and 2023, researchers analysed 3.8 million kilograms of debris from eight rivers on four continents, and nearly two-thirds of it was plastic. Composition varied sharply from river to river — meaning interventions have to be designed locally.
How Much Plastic Is Enough to Kill a Marine Animal?
Ocean Conservancy researchers worked through data from more than 10,000 animal autopsies to put numbers on this question. The findings:
- Seabirds: swallowing six pieces of rubber, each smaller than a pea, is lethal 90 percent of the time. Even three pieces give a bird a 50/50 chance of dying. About 35 percent of the seabirds studied had plastic in their stomachs.
- Sea turtles: less than half a baseball’s worth of plastic is enough to kill one in two loggerhead turtles. Nearly half of the turtles studied had plastic in their guts when they died — and five of the seven sea turtle species are already threatened with extinction.
- Marine mammals: the greatest risk comes from lost fishing gear (“ghost gear”). Just 28 pieces of fishing debris, each smaller than a tennis ball, can kill a sperm whale. About half a soccer ball’s worth of soft plastic (think grocery bags) is deadly to most dolphins and seals.
These figures matter because they show which product types deliver the biggest wildlife benefit when banned or reduced — shredded balloons and plastic bags being among the most dangerous.
Europe in the Data
Country-level figures show cigarette butts dominating in Europe. In Türkiye, 151,549 of 161,226 items collected were butts; in Spain, 24,577 of 31,676; in Slovenia, 10,446 of 15,012; in Germany, 17,112 of 32,046. Greece recorded 193,268 items from 16,302 volunteers, and Norway 243,869 kilograms from 20,890 volunteers.
Hungary does not appear on the 2025 country list. Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Czechia do — the latter two with only a few dozen volunteers each. In other words, joining requires neither a coastline nor thousands of participants.
How a Landlocked Country Connects
Ocean Conservancy deliberately held its fortieth-anniversary flagship event on a river bank, at Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C., where 326 volunteers removed more than 1,500 pounds of debris in a few hours. The message is simple: litter entering urban rivers travels hundreds of kilometres downstream and ends up as marine debris.
Hungary is not a bystander here but an upstream country. Whatever enters the Tisza, the Danube, the Sajó or a smaller watercourse is heading for the Black Sea. Hungary’s own river cleanup tradition — the PET Kupa and the TeSzedd! campaigns — does what the ICC does: it removes the waste. What is usually missing is item-and-type-level recording that can be compared year over year.
And that costs nothing. ICC data reach the open database via the Clean Swell mobile app, and anyone can contribute — including from a Hungarian river bank or lakeshore.
Four Things Worth Adopting
Practical takeaways for municipalities, schools, companies and NGOs:
- Don’t just collect — count. A simple type-by-type data sheet multiplies the value of an event. After five years you can talk about a trend, not just an experience.
- Use consistent categories. The ICC’s ten main categories produce internationally comparable data, which is worth far more than a one-off list of your own.
- Feed the data into decisions. Butts, caps and bags top the lists for a reason: each is addressable with concrete local measures — butt receptacles, smoke-free zones, single-use packaging rules for events, deposit return schemes.
- Prevention is the goal, not collection. Forty years of data prove that picking litter up does not solve the problem on its own — but the data from picking it up underpin the rules that do.
Summary
The most important legacy of the forty-year-old International Coastal Cleanup is not the 183,900 tonnes of debris removed. It is the 439 million itemised data points, built over four decades with a consistent method and kept publicly accessible. That is what turned into bans, fees, producer responsibility schemes and scientific literature.
Translated into practice: a cleanup becomes a policy instrument the moment you start measuring it.
International Coastal Cleanup: Frequently Asked Questions
What is the International Coastal Cleanup?
The International Coastal Cleanup is Ocean Conservancy’s annual volunteer cleanup programme, launched in 1986. Participants not only remove litter from shorelines and waterways, they also record every item by count and type. Over forty years, 19.6 million volunteers in 166 countries have taken part, building the world’s longest publicly available marine debris dataset.
How much litter was collected during the 2025 International Coastal Cleanup?
In the 2025 season, 630,069 volunteers collected 13,861,048 individual items weighing 3,586,528 kilograms, across 24,364 kilometres of shoreline and waterway. On top of that, volunteers logged 1,340,349 fragments of plastic and foam smaller than 2.5 centimetres — pieces that can no longer be attributed to any specific product.
What is the most commonly found item on the world’s shorelines?
Across four decades, cigarette butts lead with 65.6 million items. In the 2025 season, however, plastic beverage bottles took first place with 1,338,712 items, with butts second at 1,197,920. Almost every item at the top of the list is single-use, low-value packaging.
Why does counting litter item by item matter?
Because it turns a cleanup into regulatory evidence. ICC data showed that bag bans and fees cut plastic bags by 25 to 47 percent as a share of collected items, and the same dataset contributed to MARPOL Annex V, Kenya’s bag ban, and more than 1,200 U.S. municipal rules on cigarette butts.
How can a landlocked country take part in a coastal cleanup?
Without a coastline, through rivers: litter entering a river eventually becomes marine debris. Ocean Conservancy held its own anniversary flagship event on a river bank. Data from Hungarian river cleanups can be uploaded to the open international database via the Clean Swell app, using categories that are comparable across countries.
Source:
Ocean Conservancy — 40th International Coastal Cleanup, 2025–2026 Report. Read the full report here.
