PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — Labor day weekend is officially underway and crowds of people are hitting the beaches to enjoy the long weekend. Volunteers across the bay area came out on Saturday morning to make sure they were cleaned up.
“This morning I woke up and I decided, let's get some trash off the beach!" said Corey Melke, one of the volunteers.
Caddy’s Waterfront Restaurant hosted beach cleanup events at all seven of its locations, and they plan to keep the movement going.
“We're looking at doing it three to four times a year," said Scott Campbell with Caddy's. "To keep the beaches clean and give back to the community that's given to us for so many years.”
Florida has 825 miles of beaches and that means hundreds of thousands of tons of trash wash up on the shore every single year, and volunteers are reminding beachgoers, every little bit helps.
"It's like, oh, it's one cigarette, but it's really not. It's thousands and thousands of cigarettes. If you come out here, just pick up, you see something on the floor, pick it up, because at the end of the day, it is really actually helping,” said Lauren Iovino, a volunteer and environmental science teacher at Boca Ciega High School.
Lovino said she offered her students extra credit if they showed up to help out.
"We're leaving this earth for the future generation. So I always tell my students, honestly, the grade in the classroom is not the biggest thing to me. It's coming out here, learning, helping clean up what you're going to leave to future generations."
She’s not alone in her message. Other volunteers echoed the same sentiments.
"I see a lot of kids doing it, and I think that's really important that we kind of spread that message to who we're raising our kids around us, that, hey, this is where trash belongs," said Laura Barrett, another volunteer.
It was a community effort to keep bay area beaches beautiful.
"We don't want anybody getting sick. You don't want to build up," said Scott Campbell.
Volunteers were also looking to set an example.
"It's not like there's far to find out where to put your trash. So I think it's super easy just to walk into any of the trash cans and throw it out," said Barrett.