Your Cleanup Makes a Difference. So Does Your Data.

When you spend an hour picking up litter in your neighborhood, along a roadway, or at the beach, you are making a difference. Every bottle, wrapper, cigarette butt and piece of trash you remove is one less piece of litter in our environment. We truly appreciate the time and effort you give to keeping Martin County beautiful.

But there is one more step we need your help with: reporting what you found.

It may seem like a small thing, but cleanup data can tell a much bigger story. When you report the types and amounts of litter collected, that information helps us understand what is ending up in our community and where.

For cleanups connected to the International Coastal Cleanup, local data becomes part of a much larger picture. Information collected by volunteers around the world helps scientists, conservation organizations, governments and other organizations better understand litter and develop solutions.

Your cleanup data also helps us here in Martin County. By seeing which types of litter show up most often, we can identify trends, focus education and outreach efforts, and help target campaigns toward the behaviors and sources contributing most to the problem.

So while picking up the litter is the most visible part of a cleanup, reporting what you collected is what helps us turn that effort into action.

We know we can do a better job of capturing this information, and we are asking our volunteers to help us make data reporting part of every cleanup.

It is easy to report your results! You can use our paper cleanup data card to record what you find or submit your results online using our Clean Up Report Form.

The next time you organize or participate in a cleanup, remember: Do not just pick it up. Tell us what you found. Your efforts will help make Martin County cleaner today and give us the information we need to create a cleaner tomorrow.

To learn more about Keep Martin Beautiful visit, keepmartinbeautiful.org.