The volunteers have gone home, the gloves have been packed away, but the numbers left behind at the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) Flagship Cleanup are telling a story that cannot simply be swept away.

On International Coastal Cleanup Day, September 19, EnviroTek Group joined hundreds of volunteers at the Palisados Go-Kart Track for JET’s flagship cleanup under the theme “Away is a Place.” By the end of the exercise, 665 participants had helped collect 4,862.5 pounds of waste and recorded 32,831 individual items from approximately one mile of coastline.

And the details matter.

The cleanup data recorded 7,164 plastic beverage bottles, 6,248 plastic bottle caps, 4,005 plastic bags, 2,512 plastic and foam pieces and 1,734 food wrappers, among thousands of other items. These figures represent the overall results recorded at the JET Flagship Cleanup site, including the contribution of EnviroTek’s volunteer team.

For EnviroTek, the most important takeaway is what the waste reveals. “Once you see the numbers, it becomes difficult to think of coastal pollution as simply a beach-cleaning issue,” said Raymond Pryce, Environmental Scientist and Chief Operating Officer at EnviroTek Group. “What we find along the coastline is evidence of what is happening further upstream, in our communities, drains, gullies, waterways and consumption patterns. The cleanup removes what is already there, but the data helps us ask how we prevent it from getting there in the first place.”

That distinction is central to International Coastal Cleanup. JET collects and categorises the debris found by volunteers, contributing data that helps build a broader understanding of marine litter and inform efforts to improve waste management and protect coastal ecosystems. EnviroTek Group is grateful to its volunteer team and to JET for coordinating the cleanup, while recognising that meaningful coastal resilience requires action long after International Coastal Cleanup Day has passed. For a Caribbean region increasingly focused on climate resilience, environmental protection and sustainable development, what reaches the coast is data worth paying attention to.