TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Gasparilla was a day full of krewes, floats, beads, and treasures in Tampa Bay.

After the pirates finished storming the city and the cannons quieted, there was a lot of work to be done.

The annual Gasparilla cleanup event was held Sunday morning to keep Tampa beautiful and protect our marine wildlife.

Volunteers with Keeping Tampa Bay Beautiful took to the streets to clean all the trash.

“We’re here to kind of pick up after people that dropped their beads, their bottle, or whatever, and try to make sure that the neighborhoods around this area are nice and clean,” said Alan Donn, a board member for KTBB.

“We have been wanting to volunteer for a while,” community volunteer Ashlyn McGraw said. “I think just giving back to the community, in general, is a very important thing, especially for such a big thing like Gasparilla that keeps this town very alive and well-known.”

Bottle after bottle, bead after bead, hundreds of volunteers spent hours trying to help the environment.

“You can’t just make a bunch of messes and then not expect to clean them up. That’s why we help. We help clean up beaches, we help clean up streets to make our environment better,” said Kelsey Cerka.

The non-profit partnered with the Buccaneers and Suzuki Marine to make this event happen.

“For this event, it is on the water and at Suzuki Marine, we deal with the water, so what better way to team up with Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful— pick up trash, and try to reduce the plastic by recycling,” said Brandon Cerka, with Suzuki Marin.

“No matter when you’re out, if you see waste, you pick it up and dispose of it properly,” Cerka added. “This is one great way that we can all come together and clean up Tampa Bay as a community, and make it look better for the next year and the year after that.”

If nobody cleans up all the mess that is left behind, it can be dangerous for our wildlife.

“All of the trash is eventually going to make its way into our waterways through our storm drains. It’s going to head to our beaches, hurt our marine life, and it’s going to hurt the delicate ecosystem that we so treasure in Tampa Bay,” said Kristina Moreta, with KTBB. “It’s really important that we clean up right after the event.”

In 2024, around 600 pounds of beads were collected. This year, the non-profit has even more cleanup sites to go through.

After the event, Keeping Tampa Bay Beautiful takes all of the beads from each site and gives them to the MacDonald Training Center. The center then cleans them up and repurposes them to be sold for the next pirate invasion.