PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WMBB) — On Saturday, Bay County held its third annual Love the Bay Clean Up Day.
The event is part of an international movement held by the Ocean Conservancy on the third Saturday of September.
“We record all the trash that’s picked up all the pounds and it’s put into a website and it’s available for the public to view and see how many pounds of trash are cleaned up on this one day during the year,” Director of St. Andrews Bay Watch Christina Cantrell said.
Panama City Quality of Life, St. Andrews Bay Watch, and St. Andrews and St. Joseph Bay Estuary Program partnered together for this year’s cleanup.
They were joined by 40 volunteers, one as young as five years old.
“We cleaned up along Beach Drive, over at the park, along the shoreline near Captain Ernie’s, and right here on the marina,” Cantrell said.
In addition to along the shorelines, one volunteer took the plunge into St. Andrews Marina to clean up the debris that may fallen overboard.
“It’s important, especially important to the marina because this whole marina and really St Andrew’s was based and founded upon the fishing industry.,” St. Andrews Marina director Brian Hamilton said. “So it’s important to us to keep the plastics and different things, bags, plastic, water bottles. And I think today we even picked up a microwave.”
Hamilton said they found a microwave at the bottom of the marina, which they were fortunately able to recover.
In total volunteers collected over 300 pounds of trash.
Click here for the total amount of trash collected nationwide.
