DELRAY BEACH, Fla. (CNN) — From the Panhandle to Port St. Lucie, Bryan Galvin covered every inch of sand he could find along the peninsula of Florida picking up every piece of plastic in sight.
“This is a chlorine bottle from the Dominican Republic,” he pointed out.
It’s one of the many items he picked up during his four-month, 1,200-mile trek. He and a friend collected 3,000 pounds, and now some of it is in his backyard in Delray Beach, WPTV reports.
“We can get out there every day and pick it up, we can tell people how bad this issue really is to them, but when we come back out the next day it’s still going be there,” he said.
That’s why he’s now sorting through every piece, documenting each one, then uploading it to a database so one day you can map it all out and see for yourself how big of a problem it is.
“It’s far greater than just a straw ban; it’s something we need to look at,” he warns.
He says it’s about educating people to think differently. “There’s plastic just around, people just standing around, just standing around.”
He says we have to start thinking differently about trash and realize it can have an impact on many of our decisions. “You’d be actually better to refuse that one bag or two at the store every time you go to the store, than to think that walking the beach every day for four months is ever going to make a dent.”
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