One Piece Each is a group which brings regular college students, parents and grandparents together to clean up Volusia County beaches and parks.

  • One Piece Each cleans up Volusia beaches, parks
  • The group is encouraging others to pick up trash

One of those members is 76-year-old Mary Riensema.

She walks the beaches every day, stopping every few steps to pickup trash.

"See, here we have, I find a lot of these, and straws are very dangerous. Well, it's all very dangerous," said Riensema.

The group is calling on everyone to just pick up a piece of trash that was left behind and throw it away.

The group's founder, Joseph Cover, says the idea started when he was sitting on the beach one day watching people pass by trash, and just leave it there.

While the county provides trash cans, not everyone uses them.

His first thought was to rant about it on Facebook.

"And I stopped short and I thought to myself, instead of adding to the problem, maybe I could do something different, maybe if we just picked up one piece, it would make a difference," Cover said.

He launched the effort by organizing groups to do just that. But he didn't just bring people together in Volusia County, he went bigger.

"We had people posting from Thailand, Montreal, from South Africa. All posting and tagging one piece each doing their part to clean up," Cover said

And, its not just about picking up trash. The group also lets people know how dangerous something as trivial as a plastic fork can be to marine life.

"The sea animals eat it and its killing them," said Riensema.

"It's so important because we dropped the ball as a generation on our environment. I'm taking personal responsibility for that, we have," said Cover.

Cover believes what we leave behind for future generations should not be trash.

While Riensema and others pick up trash daily, they do have group events, like one planned for early June.

One Piece Each posts those event on Facebook.