Saltwater Brewery - What's Brewing

September in Delray Beach is the month that makes the point. The heat sits on you, the afternoon storms arrive more or less on schedule, and by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center climatology the Atlantic hurricane season peaks in the first half of September. Sea turtle nesting season is still running along our stretch of coast through the end of October. Every one of those afternoon downpours pushes whatever was sitting in a parking lot or a swale toward a storm drain, then a canal, then an inlet. And the third Saturday of September is International Coastal Cleanup Day.

This is a sustainability post: a short list of what we will claim, and a longer list of what you can do.

What we will actually claim

We are the brewery behind the edible six-pack ring — E6PR. It is made from barley and wheat byproduct instead of conventional plastic; E6PR describes it as compostable and, if it ends up in the water instead of a bin, safe for marine life. National Geographic covered it.

That is the claim. That is the whole claim.

You will notice what is not in it. No count of animals saved, because our founders do not have a number they can stand behind. No list of programs we have not built. Sustainability marketing has a habit of sprinting ahead of the receipts, and a brewery in a town this size gets found out quickly. What we can say plainly is that we put our beer in a ring that was not built to outlive the beer. The rest of this post points to work that is measurable, most of which has nothing to do with us.

Where the debris actually comes from

NOAA’s Marine Debris Program makes the point that reframes the problem: most marine debris starts on land. It blows out of truck beds, escapes bins on collection day, and rides stormwater off pavement into drains that empty into the canals we all drive over without looking.

By NOAA’s measure Florida has more than 8,400 miles of tidal shoreline, more than any state except Alaska.

Ocean Conservancy has organized the International Coastal Cleanup since 1986, and by its own count more than 19 million volunteers have collected over 400 million pounds of trash in that time. Closer to home, cigarette litter is enough of a problem that Keep Palm Beach County Beautiful runs a Cigarette Litter Prevention Program. The small stuff is the stuff that stays.

The one thing to do this month: Saturday, September 19

International Coastal Cleanup Day falls on the third Saturday of September, which in 2026 is Saturday, September 19. In Palm Beach County it is organized by Keep Palm Beach County Beautiful, which has the countywide cleanup set for that date, a site registration form open now, and sites running from Boca Raton up to Tequesta. Ocean Conservancy coordinates the event worldwide.

We are not hosting one, and we are not inventing one for a blog post. We would rather send you to the groups who already know which access points need the help.

What makes a September cleanup morning actually work here:

• Go early. First light to about nine. In this heat, an eight o’clock start is a different sport than a ten o’clock one.
• Bring a bucket, not a bag. A loose plastic bag on a windy morning becomes the thing you came to remove.
• Count what you pick up. Ocean Conservancy’s Clean Swell app logs items into the same global data set since 1986, and the county organizers ask volunteers to use it. The counting is what turns a Saturday morning into evidence.
• Stay off the dune line. Nesting season runs through October 31. Walk the wet sand, work the wrack line, and leave marked nests and dune vegetation alone.
• Get the small stuff. Filters, bottle caps, fragments, foam crumbs. The big obvious items get picked up by somebody. The confetti does not.

Fishing line, and the bins most people walk past

If you fish here, this is the one habit worth building. Monofilament is thin, nearly invisible in water, and lasts a very long time. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission calls improperly discarded line a devastating problem for marine life and the environment — and it is the one item with a statewide system already built for it. FWC’s Monofilament Recovery & Recycling Program keeps collection bins at boat ramps, piers and marinas across Florida, with a bin-location map at mrrp.myfwc.com.

Line does not belong in a curbside cart. Clip old leader into short pieces, keep a lidded coffee can in the truck for it, and empty it into a bin next time you launch. Local anglers have a good reason to bother: Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach takes in sick and injured sea turtles from this coast, and line entanglement is a familiar reason they arrive.

The unglamorous recycling truth

Flexible plastic — bags, film, conventional six-pack rings — does not belong in a curbside bin. The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County runs a dual-stream program here — yellow bin for paper, blue for containers — and keeps plastic bags and foam out of both, calling bags a major source of contamination on the processing line. Check the list before you guess. Florida DEP and NOAA’s Marine Debris Program have the underlying picture.

And keep cutting conventional plastic rings before you bin them. Photodegradable plastics need sunlight to break down at all, so buried under sand or sunk in a canal they can persist for a very long time. Cutting takes four seconds and removes the loop.

One Saturday

None of this is heroic. A ring made of barley does not fix an ocean, and neither does one morning with a bucket. But the Coastal Cleanup has run every September since 1986 precisely because a lot of ordinary mornings, counted, add up to something an agency can act on.

The Cleanup wraps up well before noon. We open at noon on Saturday and run to eleven, if you want somewhere cool to sit afterward with sand still on you. We are the first building off the I-95 Atlantic Avenue exit, at 1701 W. Atlantic Ave. Whatever else is on the calendar is on our Delray Beach events page.

Wear a hat. Drink more water than you think you need. It is September.