Environment Events in Treasure Island

Join The City of Treasure Island in partnership with Keep Pinellas Beautiful to explore the hidden dangers of plastics and microplastics! A rising environmental concern both locally and globally is the presence of plastics and microplastics (i.e. nurdles and fragmented plastics) in our waterways and its broader impact on the health of the ecosystem. Microplastics are of great concern in Tampa Bay due to their documented presence, their long residence time, and their demonstrated ingestion by and harm caused to marine organisms including fish and shellfish consumed by people. To this end, Keep Pinellas Beautiful has created a Microplastics Program to educate citizens about the harm plastic litter causes and what we can do to help limit plastic pollution in the first place. The program also engages Pinellas County citizen scientists of all ages to collect water samples from across the county and then filter and analyze those samples to determine the abundance of microplastics in our waterways. We hope these efforts will inspire our community to get involved in local cleanup efforts and to reduce the amounts of single-use plastics we use in our everyday lives.