PMDP season recap 2025

Kevin O'Brien
4 days ago
4 min read

We wanted to share this update from Kevin, James and the PMDP Team looking back on the 2025 season cleaning up Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary:

Aloha PMDP ʻOhana,

As I write this, I’m filled with gratitude for our stewardship community. Thanks to your steady support throughout the past year, I’m happy to announce that another successful cleanup season is officially in the books. This year's efforts resulted in the removal of 184,940lbs (92 tons) of marine debris from the sensitive reefs and shorelines of our beloved Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary!

2025 Marks a Turning Point for Marine Debris Cleanups in Papahānaumokuākea

This year we noticed an interesting phenomenon: We started coming home from Papahānaumokuākea with less marine debris. Don’t get me wrong, 184,000lbs is still a crushing amount (this is the equivalent weight of 7 full sized school buses), but it’s less than the 330,000lbs collected in 2024, despite a similar level of effort.

PMDP’s intensive efforts to catch up with the million-pound backlog of debris in Papahānaumokuākea over the last five years is finally paying off, and the numbers prove it. As we catch up with the dense backlog of older debris, we anticipated that we would eventually see a reduction in the amount of weight we removed. Going forward, our removal numbers will become more representative of just the new, fresh accumulation that washes into the sanctuary each year.

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The team works together to haul in a large net from the waters of Kamokuokamohoaliʻi

Photo: Andy Sullivan-Haskins

What this means for our operation is that the new accumulation is more spread out across a huge area, so our team must swim further for every pound of debris collected. As an illustration of how hard our team worked to bring home 184,000 pounds of debris this season, the amount of coral reef area our team surveyed this year equaled 4,700 acres. To cover this much ground, our divers laid eyes upon a whopping 205 MILLION square feet of reef. This number represents A LOT of swimming! Looking ahead, our ongoing work to develop new drone and satellite detection methods will be critically important to keeping our operations efficient. We look forward to updating you on this progress!

184,940lbs of marine debris removed in 2025!

Despite catching up with the backlog, the threat to wildlife and coral reefs posed by the annual accumulation we face moving forward is no less severe. If we let up now, we’ll be right back where we started in 2020. We have to keep the pedal to the metal to stay ahead of the problem, which is why we need your help this month to fund the gaps in our 2026 cleanup budget.

Because, as we know, marine debris NEVER stops.

Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for a recap of 2025’s cleanup numbers. But, before we do that…. we need your help!

With Warm Aloha,

Kevin, James and the PMDP Team

Giving Tuesday marks the beginning of something special:

our annual Holiday Match Challenge Campaign.

Here's how it works: We've set an ambitious goal to raise $50,000 throughout December—and thanks to incredible partners like Sea Salts of Hawaiʻi, every single dollar will be matched 1:1, turning your gift into double the impact for our 2026 operations.

Kona Salt Farm pledged the first $5,000 in matching funds, and as we reach each partner's milestone, we'll announce the next match supporter. Spoiler alert: the next $5,000 match is from Sun Powered Yachts!

Donate to PMDP & double your impact today

A donation of $500 becomes $1,000. A gift of $2,500 becomes $5,000. And together, we'll reach our goal and fund a full season of life-saving debris removal in 2026. Every net we pull from the reef, every piece of plastic we remove from a nesting beach, gives Hawaiian monk seals, seabirds, and countless other species a better chance at survival. But this work is only possible because of supporters like you. Will you help us hit that first $5,000 milestone and unlock Sea Salts of Hawaii's match?

Donate To Double Your Impact TODAY!

This campaign runs through December 31, and we'll be sharing updates throughout the month as we celebrate each matching partner and move closer to our goal.

If you've been thinking about making a year-end gift, there's no better time than today. Thank you for being part of this mission. The wildlife of Papahānaumokuākea—and the teams working to protect them—are counting on you.

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