Volunteers collect 4,500 kg of trash from Dutch and Belgian beaches

Over 2,500 volunteers collected 4,500 kilograms of litter along the North Sea coast in Belgium and the Netherlands on Sunday. The large group of people worked to clean up hastily discarded trash in 69 municipalities as part of the Eneco Clean Beach Cup.

The volunteers marched up and down the Dutch and Belgian coast and the surrounding area, covering a total distance of 1,147 kilometers. They stuffed 481 garbage bags full of rubbish, which measured at over 15,000 liters by volume.

The trash will then be handed off to waste management firm Renewi, which will recycle as much of the material as possible. Once sorted, some of the garbage will be processed "as secondary raw material for new products, or for other useful applications," Eneco said. "In this way, materials remain in the cycle, and requiring less and less  mining of scarce raw materials. This is a crucial step towards building a circular economy."

According to the Plastic Soup Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Amsterdam, plastic production is expected to increase by 40 percent over the coming years. "If we don’t do anything about the plastic soup, oceans will carry more plastic than fish (by weight) by 2050. The United Nations warns that marine life will be irreparably destroyed," the organization claims.