National CleanUp Day

National CleanUp Day is held annually in the United States and globally on the third Saturday of September. In the United States, there are cleanups held in every State and Territory. It encourages country-scale organized and individual cleanup events and volunteering to keep the outdoors clean and prevent plastic from entering the ocean. National CleanUp Day is organized by Clean Trails, a non-profit organization founded by Bill Willoughby and Steve Jewett.

History
The inaugural National CleanUp Day was held in 2017 and had more than 225,000 volunteers. The 2018 event had over 1,500,000 volunteers, 14 million pounds of waste collected, and was held in conjunction with the inaugural World Cleanup Day.

The 2019 cleanup received nearly two million volunteers and resulted in the collection of 18 million pounds of waste. The U.S. event is coordinated with World Cleanup Day and saw a combined 20 million volunteers in 170 countries, which is the largest single day global volunteer event. Beginning in 2018, the U.S. Department of Transportation participated in cleanups on their local and interstate highway systems.

In April 2019, Earth Day partnered with National CleanUp Day and Keep America Beautiful for the inaugural Earth Day CleanUp and had over 500,000 volunteers working to clean up trash and litter nationally. Earth Day and presenting partners World CleanUp Day, National CleanUp Day and Keep America Beautiful organized individual activities like Plogging and the TrashTag Challenge.