MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – April is Earth Month, with Earth Day taking place Monday. It’s the perfect time to celebrate Biscayne Bay and the ongoing effort to restore the watershed.
This past weekend, the county hosted an annual event where thousands pitched in to keep our shores clean.
“Alright everyone, let’s go clean up the bay,” exclaimed Loren Parra, Miami-Dade County’s Chief Bay Officer, as she kicked off the 42nd Annual Baynanza Clean-Up event Saturday morning.
From there it was off to the races, or to the clean-up sites to be more exact.
“Biscayne Bay is the blue heart of Miami-Dade County,” Parra explained. “It is responsible for over $64 billion of economic value on an annual basis.”
That’s why more than 4,000 volunteers, scattered across 32 clean-up sites throughout Miami-Dade Count,y came together last weekend.
“There’s nothing like literally picking up a bunch of trash and keeping our environment nice and clean,” said Sylvia Bacchelli, a Historic Virginia Key Park site volunteer.
For more than four decades, Baynanza has been a countywide effort to get all residents to do more to protect our most valuable resource.
“It’s an opportunity for people to actually get their hands dirty and see what is littering the shorelines firsthand,” explained Maggie Winchester Weiler of the Ocean Conservancy.
Many who turned out for the big bay clean-up were first-timers, essential to growing Miami-Dade’s mighty eco-army.
“Now what we’re seeing is brand new people coming into the issue, and seeing firsthand how much plastic trash is getting into Biscayne Bay,” Dave Doebler, Co-Founder and President of Volunteer Clean-Up, said.
Volunteers picked up many of the usual offenders that clutter the county’s coasts.
“Beer bottles, beer cans, plastic bags,” rattled off volunteer Emily Vasquez as she showed Local 10 News her trash collection.
Over at Morningside Park, captains from the Miami Outboard Club lent their time, their fuel, and their vessels to ferry volunteers across the bay to clean up Morningside Picnic Island.
“We were boaters so it’s important for us to make sure that our waterways are clean of debris,” explained Jimmy Ribeiro of Miami Outboard Club.
For volunteer Mario Galindo, it was about teaching his six-year-old son Ethan about the importance of good environmental stewardship.
“It’s the right moment to set an example so he can have that in his mind moving forward,” said Galindo. “And he also sets the example for others and inspires them and kind of guides him as well.”
Cushman School 6th graders Nina Balseiro and Addison Connolly were angry about all the trash that they found on Morningside Picnic Island.
“Treat these islands like you would like to your own home,” said Connolly.
“If you just like throw stuff here, it’s bad for like the animals,” added Balseiro.
You don’t need to go far to see the unfortunate impact. Just one day after Baynanza, Mike Gibaldi of Surfrider Miami recorded a nurse shark swimming with a plastic ring cutting into its gills in Biscayne Bay. It likely won’t survive.
“It’s on us, we’re polluting the planet, we’re not taking care of the planet,” explained Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. “And each of us can make a big, big difference.”
In addition to the coastal clean-ups, this year there were a record five inland clean-ups.
“What we see is a lot of cans of plastic bottles, cigarette butts,” said Raissa Fernandez, Program Manager of Healthy Little Havana.
For the past three years, Don’t Trash Our Treasure has been reporting on the enormous amount of street litter smothering the historic Little Havana neighborhood. But unfortunately, it persists.
“The street cleanup and helping to educate residents that street trash ends up in the bay is crucial to the future, the neighborhood, and the sustainability of our entire community,” underscored Christine Rupp, executive director of the Dade Heritage Trust.
DERM, which is the county agency that organizes the event, said that this year at least 17 tons of trash were picked up across the 32 sites.
“In the last 20 years, we’ve picked over a million tons of trash,” Lisa Spadafina with DERM explained. “We really have more and more *trash), which in some ways is kind of sad, because while we’re doing everything we can to try to promote the health of this game, we still have all these challenges on our hands.”
Activists emphasize that the only way to truly attack this growing pollution crisis is to stop our mindless consumption.
“Miamians make about eight pounds of trash per person per day, which is compared to a national average of five pounds,” explained Maddie Kaufman, Program Director of Debris Free Oceans. “So we’re doing something different here where we’re making a little bit way too much waste.”
And that is the main goal of Baynanza. It’s not about all the trash that was picked up, but engaging all of us to be a part of the solution by finding ways to be less wasteful, reduce our plastic footprint, and take care of our most precious backyard.
You can learn more about reducing your waste by visiting the Debris Free Oceans website, where you can find many helpful resources. If you’d like to volunteer with a local clean-up, head over to volunteercleanup.org.