It's good to know that there are at least some benefits to beach cleanups. I was involved with a citizens group a few years ago and was a member of Surfrider, which was doing beach cleanups in Oregon. However, the plastic stuff removed from the beaches was only going into landfills, from which smaller and smaller pieces of plastic does and will continue to leach into ground water and eventually back to the ocean. The citizens group did a lot of research and found a possible--no, probable--solution to much of the plastic pollution in the state. However, Surfrider was not interested in any plastic-pollution mitigation except for allowing volunteers to try to get single-use plastic bags outlawed at the state level. The state of Oregon also made it impossible for us to move forward. No organization throughout the U.S. that we contacted cared enough about the devastation even to investigate any solution, much less the one we had found.