ESTERO, Fla. (Sept. 29, 2016) – More than 30 Suffolk Construction employees and their family members, in partnership with Keep Lee County Beautiful and Fort Myers Beach Elementary School, recently participated in The Ocean Conservancy’s 31st Annual Coastal Cleanup on Saturday, Sept. 17.
This was the second beach cleanup that Suffolk employees have participated in this year for the “Keep Lee County Beautiful” initiative.
The Suffolk team spent the morning cleaning up litter and debris on the beach near Fort Myers Beach Elementary School.
“We continue to be committed to making a positive impact in our local communities through grassroots volunteer work like Keep Lee County Beautiful,” said Josh Christensen, vice president of West Coast Florida operations for Suffolk Construction.
Hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world participated in this year’s International Coastal Cleanup to stem the tide of trash entering our ocean. The International Coastal Cleanup is the world’s largest single-day volunteer effort to remove trash from local waterways, beaches, lakes and rivers. In the past three decades, more than 225 million items of trash have been logged and removed from our beaches and waterways by more than 11.5 million volunteers.
Marine debris is harmful to marine environments and wildlife, especially marine plastic debris which has been documented as harming nearly 700 species of wildlife. Every year, an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic waste flows into the ocean, and at least 80 percent of ocean plastic originates from land-based sources.
Without concerted global action, there could be one ton of plastic for every three tons of fin fish by 2025, leading to significant environmental, economic and health issues.
