TAMPA, Fla. — July 4th has come and gone, and now, the focus is on cleaning up after all the parades and fireworks shows across Tampa Bay.
Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful partnered with the Freedom Boat Club in the cleanup efforts. In a matter of hours, hundreds of garbage bags were filled by dozens of volunteers.
"There were exploded and unexploded fireworks everywhere, including the single-use plastics, beer cans, and bottles and things like that," Captain Katie Falcon, the Freedom Boat Club director of community investment, explained.
On Davis Islands, roughly 100 volunteers spent their Wednesday morning picking up all that was left behind. Adriana Pereira was one of those volunteers.
"I mean, you can even do it by yourself," Pereira said. "But yeah, I think it's worth it. Just any small trash is worth it."
What made this cleanup a little easier than others: a lot of the trash from the Fourth of July was brought to the garbage bins. But there was so much of it, those bins were overflowing.
"People tried to do the right thing," Falcon said. "But they were just overflowing. And so the trash was laid around them, which is fine until the winds pick up and then they're going to end up in our bays and waterways."
Throughout the Davis Islands Beach and boat ramp area, some of the trash piled up had already blown toward Hillsborough Bay.
"When you really look, there was a lot of tiny little pieces of glass and bottle caps, and just really, really small trash that was lying around," Pereira said.
In two hours, 200 garbage bags were filled. It's an estimated ton of trash collected.
"Please find the garbage can for your trash," Falcon pleaded. "We don't mind volunteering, but it would if all do a little, we don't have to have cleanups like this all the time."
Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful is hosting more cleanups over the next few days. For information to get involved, click here.
Malique Rankin is a general assignment reporter with 10 Tampa Bay. You can email her story ideas at mrankin@10tampabay.com and follow her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.