The Gasparilla parade celebrates Tampa’s legendary past and attracts thousands of people each year. While it is a fun way to spend your weekend- it is important to understand the environmental impact it has on the city.
During the parade, thousands of beads, bottles, and other pieces of litter are discarded throughout the city and the surrounding waters, leaving it up to the local authorities to clean up after them. Fortunately, Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful, a local non-profit, organizes cleanup events where volunteers come and pick up trash the day after Gasparilla.
“It’s one of the largest events that Tampa has, so bringing this many people into town, the trash is going to explode at that point,” said Kristina Moreta, Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful’s Development Director.
This year the cleanup brought in around 500 volunteers across 7 designated clean up areas with one additional dive site.
In order to run the dive site, Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful partners with Adventure Outfitters, a family-owned company of certified volunteer divers. The company works to rid the bay of trash, in hopes of preventing waste from reaching the ocean and harming marine life.
According to Fox13, Jenny Blevins of Adventure Outfitters shared “On Sunday morning alone, we found nearly 624 pounds of trash, including 2,000 beads, 200 plastic bottles, 100 Jello shots, and 50 rubber duckies.”
In Tampa, all our storm drains lead directly into the Tampa Bay and the Hillsborough River, making it important that groups like Keep Tampa Beautiful and Adventure Outfitters work to combat the pollution created by this event. According to Moreta, “If we are not able to get it today, it does end up affecting our marine life, our beaches… that eventually leads to us.”
Moving forward, it is not only crucial that organizations like these continue their work, but it is essential that members of our community continue to volunteer and educate others on the harm that their beads, cups, and bottles can do to our environment. “It’s just a bottle’…there are 300,000 people out there thinking the same thing and that’s 300,000 pieces of litter on the floor at that point,” said Moreta. The environment is an important part of life and it’s crucial that the community takes the initiative to clean it after celebrations.
