International Coastal Clean-Up Day 2026

Once a year, we join International Coastal Clean-Up Day, a volunteer effort started by Ocean Conservancy 40 years ago. The clean-up has never only been about removing trash from coastlines. Volunteers also record what they find, so that the most common types of trash can be identified and traced back to their sources. This year, almost 300 volunteers cleaned five sites along a combined stretch of about 9 kilometres. Together they filled 127 sacks with around 800 kilograms of trash. You can read about earlier years in our posts on the 2017 and 2018 clean-ups. Beach and dive clean-ups will not solve plastic pollution on their own, but they send a strong message to the community and to policymakers that action is needed, both locally and at a systemic level. Seeing the amount of trash on our own beaches has a different impact from hearing the statistics. As consumers, we may not think much about our choices, but finding the packaging of products we buy every week littered along the shore makes us reflect on them, and start opting for more sustainable alternatives.

The clean-up

We cleaned four sites in Zamboanguita, the municipality where MCP is based: Malatapay in Maluay, Basak, Poblacion and Lutoban. In Siaton, we cleaned the coast of Andulay. Before the day itself, we gathered fisherfolk leaders and members of the local government units to plan the clean-up, so that it could take place at all sites at the same time. We also held an orientation for participants on trash accounting, using the Clean Swell app and Ocean Conservancy's Ocean Trash Data Form, which lists everything from cigarette butts to foam food packaging. On the day, our team started earlier than on a usual diving day. Even so, when we reached the sites, local volunteers were already busy picking up trash and had filled several bags.

What we found

At the four Zamboanguita sites, every item was counted and recorded: 12,523 in total. Plastic beverage bottles were the most common single item, with 2,624 collected. Small fragments of plastic and foam, pieces smaller than 2.5 cm, came close behind and together made up about a quarter of everything we counted. Most of it was single-use: drink bottles, cans and caps, together with packaging and takeaway items, made up almost 60% of all the trash we recorded.

One of the sad realities in the Philippines is the sachet economy, where a wide range of everyday products, from toothpaste to soy sauce, is sold in small plastic sachets. It reflects the country's poverty: many families depend on a daily wage and cannot afford to buy in bulk. Sachets may look like a solution, but they do nothing to address poverty itself, and they are harmful to the environment. Not long ago, reusable bottles were common in many communities across the country, but sachets have since largely replaced them. Sachets are also hard to count. The data form has no category for them, so whole sachets are mostly logged as food wrappers or packaging, and once they break apart, they are counted as fragments. That makes it impossible to say exactly how many we picked up, but food wrappers and other packaging alone came to more than 2,000 items.

Plastic bottles are easier to recycle than sachets, but where waste collection and management are lacking, they still end up as litter.

The Philippines and marine plastic

The Philippines is often named as the world's largest source of plastic entering the ocean, based on estimates from a 2021 study by Meijer and colleagues. We think that ranking is widely misunderstood. The study modelled how likely plastic waste is to reach the sea, and the country's geography, with many rivers close to the coast and heavy rainfall, gives it a high probability of plastic being carried into the ocean. It does not mean that Filipinos are unusually wasteful. There is an undeniable plastic waste problem in the country, but it is neither accurate nor fair to simply blame the population. The bigger picture includes the lack of choices most Filipinos have, and weak or missing waste management. Trash in our seas causes undeniable harm to marine life, from animals dying after swallowing it to microplastics becoming part of the ecosystem itself. At MCP, we record marine trash as part of our reef surveys, and our recent report, Below the Surface: What 3,856 Surveys Reveal About Marine Trash, looks at how waste accumulates across our sites.

Beyond clean-up day

Clean-up day is the most visible part of our work against marine litter, but far from the biggest. Our Pro Ocean team collects litter all year round along the coasts of Zamboanguita, Siaton, Santa Catalina, Dauin and Dumaguete City, and has removed more than 427,000 kilograms since the partnership began in 2020. About 40% of it, by weight, is recycled. You can read more on our ocean plastics page and in our post on fighting ocean plastics with Pro Ocean. None of this would happen without our partners. Thank you to the barangay officials, Bantay Dagat sea wardens, and the MENRO and LDRRMO staff of Zamboanguita, the fisherfolk associations of Basak and Lutoban, the Triple M Association of Malatapay, Youth in Service, and everyone in Andulay who joined us.

We hope these small steps towards a cleaner coast ripple out into the community, and that caring for our coastline becomes something we do not only on clean-up day, but in our everyday actions and choices.