Cleaning Orleans For Our Future

Cape Cod News editorial staff

2 May, 2025 – ORLEANS, MA – What better day to spring clean Orleans beaches than Earth Day? The Orleans Pond Coalition and the Surfrider Foundation gathered over 50 volunteers to get our ponds and landings summer ready. Students and members of the award-winning Green Club at the Nauset Regional High School where at Nauset Beach to connect with the community.

"We do a ton of stuff within our school and the community. all things environmental. So we run a lot of beach cleanups ... Everyone in this club really wants to actually make a difference."

Faye Adams

Member, The Green Club, Nauset Regional High School

Are Orleans' beaches clean?

Trash travel far, Eric Spengler has seen it first hand on the Orleans Pond Coalition's annual beach cleanups. Every April the Coalition celebrates Earth Day by inviting the public to clean the most visited beaches and landings in town. Spengler, who has been Chair for the Coalition for four years, says the most unusual trash he has found had blown all the was from Boston to Lower Cape Cod.

I found that there was a lot of debris that was from a construction site in the Boston Harbor that ended up on our beaches here about three years ago," Spengler said. "And that was from the Seaport area. And to see that material like that can travel so far, I thought was extraordinarily impressive."

Earth Day 2025 was Tuesday 22 April, but the Coalition waited for the weekend to gather as many volunteers as possible. Saturday 26 April over 50 volunteers came to the meeting point at Nauset Beach to pick up tongs, buckets and bags to pick up trash at beaches such as Priscilla Landing, Crystal Lake and Skaket Beach.

Who are the Surfrider Foundation?

For the second year in a row Surfrider Foundation was collaborating with the Coalition to audit the volunteers' findings. Murali Sastry, Chair for the Cape Cod chapter, was on site.

"We categorize and log all of the items that have collected on the beach, whether it's plastics, bottles, cans. And what we do is we input that into our national database and we provide that to our corporate entity, which is located in California," said Sastry.

The data is used to lobby for policy reform at a federal level, but Sastry said it is at the local level they really see changes. Every year the Surfrider organize the Hill Day where they meet with state and federal local representatives for plastic regulations.

"And by doing that, we're at least educating not only congressmen and local representatives in terms of the impact that this trash collection has on our local communities, but not only the environmental aspect of it, but the health aspect of it to help them develop legislation to support some of these initiatives at the grassroots level,"