On the day of Gasparilla, people are having fun and enjoying food/ drinks, but they aren’t usually thinking about cleaning up after themselves. But the aftermath of Gasparilla is trashy. Trash could be seen for miles along Bayshore Blvd on Sunday. Around 450 volunteers with the City of Tampa and Tampa Bay Beautiful helped clean neighborhoods of beads and trash.
Most of the trash gets hidden in the grass, but that stuff needs to be handpicked, so volunteering is a great thing to do. Beads are collected separately and donated to the McDonalds Training Center, where the beads are cleaned and sold to floats for next year’s Gasparilla. If you don’t want your beads, you can drop them off in a bucket outside of MacDonald Training Center. Unwanted beads can also be dropped off with Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful all year round.
Any trash left on Bayshore Blvd will most likely end up in the bay, affecting marine life. Beads take thousands of years to break down into microplastics, which never decompose. So, it’s important to ensure all the trash is gone before it enters the bay. It’s our job to keep the Tampa Bay area nice and clean.
Volunteers meet at four sites throughout Tampa and clean their way down Bayshore Boulevard. There are helpers as young as three years old. It’s good to show younger kids how to care for the environment so future generations can enjoy it. Many people come to Tampa because of how beautiful it is outside. So, it’s essential to clean up after Gasparilla so that we can keep enjoying it.
Here are ways you can help clean up after Gasparilla:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/after-gasparilla-cleanup-tickets-476668166317
