National CleanUp Day is an annual event in the United States encouraging organized cleanup efforts. It is held on the third Saturday of September. The event is held in conjunction with World Cleanup Day. The US event, organized by non-profit organization called Clean Trails promotes individual and community volunteer activities to keep outdoor spaces clean and prevent plastic waste from entering the ocean.[1]
History
The first National CleanUp Day was held in 2017 and had more than 225,000 volunteers.[2] In 2018, the event had over 1,500,000 volunteers who collected 14 million pounds of waste. The 2018 event was held in conjunction with the first World Cleanup Day.[3][4][5] Beginning the same year, the Arizona and Florida Departments of Transportation scheduled highway cleanup activities to occur on National CleanUp Day. [6][7][8]
The 2019 cleanup received an estimated 20 million voters worldwide, including nearly 2 million volunteers in The United States.[9] The corresponding World Cleanup Day received an estimated 20,000,000 volunteers in 170 countries.[10]
In April 2019, Earth Day partnered with National CleanUp Day and Keep America Beautiful for the inaugural Earth Day CleanUp, which had over 500,000 volunteers working to clean up trash and litter nationally.[11][12] Earth Day and presenting partners, World CleanUp Day, National CleanUp Day, and Keep America Beautiful organized individual activities such as Plogging and the Trash Tag Challenge.[13]
In 2024, environmental activist Caulin Donaldson was nominated as the official spokesperson for National CleanUp Day.[14] The event teamed up with Terracycle to focus on cleaning up cigarette butts.[15]
