To most of us, trash talk is something reserved for the basketball court or football field. But in the Bering Sea coastal village of Goodnews Bay, it’s a key part of a program for kids to keep their community clean. 

Trash Talk sprang from an effort to clean up the 250-person village’s streets and beaches, part of a Community-Led Marine Debris Removal project supported by the Alaska Center for Marine Debris. Led by Alice Julius, the Marine Debris Coordinator for the Native Village of Goodnews Bay, a group of 36 elementary school students picked up over 1,000 pounds of trash between June and August of 2025. Students collected everything from derelict fishing gear to buckets, roofing material, and old bikes, much of it buried in the sand. 

“Fighting and digging on the beach to take out nets covered with dirt and sand was an all-day thing,” Julius said.

Julius saw the cleanups as an opportunity to teach the young volunteers the importance of being strong advocates for the land. She began Trash Talk, a program that encourages the students to become active voices in their community.

Through the program, students teach their families and peers about marine debris and collect signatures from people as a vow to help prevent and clean up litter. Julius said she knew the message would be more impactful coming from the community’s youth, and that she wants the students to feel empowered to create change. “I decided that [the students] should leave a long-lasting footprint, a memory and an idea of how they had—and will have—made an impact for themselves and others around the village,” she said. 

Julius said the students are excited to be educators, and their parents have been happy to see the program pick up where previous efforts had stalled. She noted that the cleanups benefit the fish and wildlife that many of the village’s families rely on for food. “We are preventing trash from going into the bay and its waters,  which might save seals and fish that have been feeding our people for centuries,” she noted.

The Goodnews Bay cleanup effort is one of 17 projects supported over the past three years as part of the Community-Led Marine Debris Removal program, which is funded by the NOAA Marine Debris Program. Julius said she plans to continue running cleanups on a smaller scale, and also to continue Trash Talk. She hopes the efforts will create lasting change and encourage more community members to take action.

“We all learn in different ways … and hands-on experiences do make a big difference,” she noted. “We hope that these kinds of things will enhance the ability to learn from the choices we make with our land and waters.”