Beach cleanups can save the lives of marine animals. This calculator tells you exactly how many

If you pick up plastic trash from a beach, you’re helping protect marine wildlife from harm. And every little piece—from a plastic bottle cap to food wrappers—matters, because even small amounts of this trash can be deadly to animals like sea turtles and seabirds. A new calculator from Ocean Conservancy can now quantify that impact. If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested. “We hope that people really see that beach cleanups matter,” says Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy’s manager of Ocean Plastics Research and lead co-author of the study that underpins the Wildlife Impact Calculator. The issue of ocean plastic pollution Plastic pollution in the ocean is a massive, global environmental issue. Every day, 2,000 truckloads worth of plastic waste enter ocean waters.  Addressing that pollution