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In October 1984, volunteers on the coast of Oregon hauled away 26 tonnes of waste in a single day, most of it plastics. It was the first beach cleanup of its kind—part scientific survey, part environmental action—and it helped expose how the plastic industry was polluting the ocean.

Today, however, beach cleanups risk becoming that let the industry off the hook. Over the decades, the focus shifted. And up until fairly recently, associated reports no longer named companies, but blamed "people" or "us."

But in the 1980s, three unsung women had a different vision of cleanups as citizen science, aimed squarely at corporate polluters. They wanted hard evidence of where the litter came from and who was responsible. This is a key conclusion of my : if beach cleanups are to fulfill their promise, they must go back to their roots and hold producers—not careless people—accountable.

That was the original strategy. Back in 1984, 47-year-old Judie Neilson was working at her desk at the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department when she happened upon a specialist magazine containing an article on ocean plastics.

Neilson knew that marine animals got stuck in fishing nets but, she told me recently in an interview for the Plastisphere podcast, she "didn't know they had an appetite for Styrofoam." The story of a brown bear found dead in Yakutat Bay in Alaska with 13 plastic cups in its stomach stuck with her. She had to do something.

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Armed with decades of experience as an environmental volunteer, the cleanup Neilson designed was a collective experiment, an opportunity not just to clean, but to collate data on the number and type of trash. Neilson was adamant: this "[was] not an anti-litter campaign."

Not only did the 2,100 volunteers collect those 26 tonnes of trash, but they returned 1,600 questionnaires, detailing the number and type of garbage. The data revealed a shocking state of affairs: 60% was expanded polystyrene.

The Oregon cleanup made the headlines and soon spread to other states. In 1985, there were "Debris-A-Thons" in New Jersey, "Beach Sweeps" in North Carolina, and "Get the Trash Out of the Splash" in Alabama.

But 1986 was when the cleanup took on a truly national and scientific dimension. That year, the campaign group Ocean Conservancy organized the first "Coastal Cleanup" along the Texas shoreline. Two women were at the helm. One of them, marine biologist Kathy O'Hara, was writing a for the US Environmental Protection Agency, which identified plastics as the number one marine debris.

The other, Linda Maraniss, had just relocated to Texas with her husband and two children. As a newcomer to the state, she had been shocked when visiting Padre Island National Seashore, a wild coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: "This isn't a beach," she thought, "it's a landfill."

Inspired by Neilson's efforts, Maraniss and O'Hara organized a statewide coastal cleanup on September 20 1986, hoping it would provide hard facts on, to quote : "what types of plastic is out there, where it comes from, what it does, or who controls it."

So where was all the plastic from? Beachgoers? In contrast to the the "Crying Indian" campaign in the 1970s—a famous advert, , that blamed pollution on individual litterbugs rather than corporations—the plastic trash could not only be blamed on beachgoers.

Volunteers found salt fishing bags, hard hats, fishing nets. This was evidence that plastic pollution was mainly caused by the fishing, petroleum, boating and cruising industries. Ocean dumping (from boats and oil platforms) was rife.

A shift in focus

By the early 1990s, International Coastal Cleanup Day had become a major global effort involving almost all US states, and 12 countries across the globe. It has also won important victories, including the enforcement of the ocean dumping ban on plastics. But it hadn't made a dent in the marine pollution problem.

So, in the early 2000s, Ocean Conservancy changed its strategy. First, cleanups now focused on "land-based" sources of waste—.

But the exact origin of land-based garbage was much harder to ascertain. Since land-based waste was usually made up of consumer items (plastic bottles, bags and the like), consumers, who had largely been absent from earlier reports, were now visible.

Second, cleanup reports stopped classifying the type of trash by material. Instead, they shifted to linking beach waste to activities, with in first place.

Counting plastics, depending on the method adopted, can lead to different conclusions. In the 2000s, the word "plastic" almost disappeared from cleanup reports. Instead, beach picnickers or, even more vaguely, "people" were blamed. By focusing on individual behavior rather than the material, cleanups tended to obscure the responsibility of the companies selling plastics.

Today, Ocean Conservancy still runs International Coastal Cleanup Day (in fact, this year is ) and the classification by material type has been reintroduced. Meanwhile, activists from the Break Free From Plastic coalition run different kinds of cleanups.

Their "brand audits" use citizen science to document the brands whose products end up in the ocean and hold them accountable. In their last cleanup report, volunteers found , with The Coca-Cola Company and Pepsico being the corporations whose brands were by far the most commonly found.

As plastic production soars, beach cleanups can't just tidy up the mess. Like the pioneers from the 1980s, cleanup organizers need to confront the industries behind it, and demand we move away from unnecessary single use plastics.

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