Long Island Sound trash: Volunteers remove 11,500 pounds from beaches in 2025, as well as from parks and lakes

Save the Sound volunteers collected more than 11,500 pounds of trash on New York’s and Connecticut’s Long Island Sound beaches in 2025, as well as in parks and around lakes, the group reported last week.

At 98 cleanup events in 2025, more than 2,400 volunteer trash collectors on both sides of the Sound picked up 18,321 cigarette butts, 10,741 food wrappers, 12,718 plastic and metal bottle caps and more than 8,000 other small plastic items. That totaled 11,541 pounds of trash.

Roughly 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, according to the Ocean Conservancy, an international nonprofit focused on marine pollution, biodiversity and climate change.

"Cleanups like these have many environmental benefits, such as removing items that can leach chemicals into the ground and our waterways and preventing discarded fishing lines from entangling wildlife," Save the Sound cleanup coordinator Annalisa Paltauf said in a statement. The project also "brings people together, and encourages good stewardship of our region," she said.

Much of that trash never biodegrades and is not just unsightly. It is also a monumental problem for marine life, as the United Nations Environment Programme and many conservation organizations have noted. Whales, seals, sea turtles and birds become tangled in packing straps, fishing ropes and filaments and other debris; they mistake trash for food and fill their bellies with indigestible shopping bags, balloons and bits of Styrofoam, which slowly kills them.

As the plastic bottles and other garbage is pummeled by waves and sunlight, it breaks down into tiny fragments, which are consumed by zooplankton and ultimately by marine mammals, crustaceans, fish and humans. Researchers who collected samples from the entire length of the Sound found nearly every one contained microplastics, as Newsday previously reported. 

Microplastics in the ocean accelerate global warming, too, according to a recent study: they emit carbon dioxide as they degrade and inhibit the ocean’s ability to absorb the planet-warming gas.

The Long Island Sound cleanups are part of a worldwide campaign led by the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. Over the past 40 years, participants from Cambodia to South Africa to Chile have removed nearly 400 million pounds of garbage from shorelines and waterways, the Conservancy reported.

Most ocean trash, as much as 80%, originates on land, according to the nonprofit Clean Water Action. A cigarette butt or wrapper dropped on the sidewalk can get washed into a storm drain or picked up by the wind and end up in the ocean. Trash should be disposed of properly in trash bins, ecologists say.

"One of the easiest ways to limit your impact on the environment is to switch to reuseable things," Melissa DeFrancesco, watershed conservation coordinator at The Nature Conservancy in New Haven, said in a recent webinar organized by Citizens Campaign for the Environment in Farmingdale. Insulated metal water bottles, cloth shopping totes and produce bags, and products packed in cardboard or glass are healthier for our waterways and for humans, she noted.

The real solution, though, is to stop producing so much plastic in the first place, according to Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and co-author of the book "The Problem with Plastic." Roughly 400 million metric tons of plastic are manufactured every year from planet-heating fossil fuels, and more than 95% of that is never recycled. The nonprofit Enck directs, Beyond Plastic, and other environment groups are backing a bill in the State Legislature that would require manufacturers to reduce plastic packing materials by 30% over 12 years. 

Save the Sound will launch this year’s cleanup campaign on April 18, in celebration of Earth Month. Volunteers can sign up to join in Harborfront Park in Port Jefferson; there will be cleanups the same day on the other side of the Sound, in New Haven and Mamaroneck in Westchester County, and more throughout the year.