Three-thousand, seven-hundred, and ninety-seven pounds.
That's the weight of a Pacific walrus or a small SUV.
It's also the weight of all sorts of trash that Surfrider Foundation volunteers picked up along state coastlines in 2025.
More than a third of that litter, logged in the Foundation's 2025 beach cleanup report, was picked up in a single day on San Jose Island, a 20-mile long barrier island near Port Aransas.
In May 2025, 30 volunteers with Surfrider’s Texas Coastal Bend Chapter and the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve picked up over 1,400 pounds of trash, most of it plastic.
"We counted approximately 4,600 plastic bottles," said Neil McQueen, co-chair of Surfrider Foundation’s Texas Coastal Bend Chapter. "Many of those were jammed down between the rocks in the jetty itself. If you haven't seen it, it's something you can't forget once you've seen it."
McQueen said that this year, they had over 50 volunteers pick up another 1,400 pounds of trash along San Jose Island.
Surfrider Foundation’s latest report states that the cleanup was one of 16 held in Texas last year. Nationally, Surfrider chapters and student clubs logged over 338,000 pounds of trash during 1,058 cleanups.
