After spending 15 days walking the beaches of the Netherlands, a team of hundreds of volunteers managed to collect a whopping 6.081 kilograms of rubbish - and stumbled across some interesting finds during their clean-up efforts. 

Cleaning up the beaches of the Netherlands

As part of this year’s Boskalis Beach Cleanup Tour, over 1.800 volunteers from across the Netherlands braved the rather dismal weather and trawled the entire length of the Dutch coastline in an attempt to clear up as much rubbish as possible from the country’s beaches. 

It’s safe to say their efforts were successful: together, teams stretching from up north on the beaches of the Wadden Islands all the way down to the province of Zeeland collected a seriously impressive 6.081 kilograms of rubbish. This is significantly more than during last year’s beach cleanup when volunteers gathered around 4.400 kilograms of trash. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the beach with the most rubbish was Zandvoort, where volunteers tidied up 929 kilograms of trash.

Volunteers find 10-year-old Capri Sun and 40-year-old mayonnaise

Among the 27.854 cigarette butts that volunteers discovered over the course of the 15 days, the teams also stumbled upon some more interesting pieces of rubbish. These included a bottle of alcohol from Belarus, which was found on a beach on Schiermonnikoog, tea bags from Myanmar and a cleaning agent from Vietnam on Texel, and a can of beer from Poland on Zandvoort.

At Noordwijk, the team picked up a Capri Sun pouch with an expiry date from 2013 and, even more interestingly, at Scheveningen and at Petten in North Holland, volunteers were amazed to find mayonnaise packaging from a brand that was closed down back in the 1980s - meaning the rubbish had been hanging around for at least 38 years! 

Thumb: szmuli via Shutterstock.com.