Some families in Japan recently spent their holiday weekend on the beach, but it wasn’t spent in leisure.

Since 2002, Amway has hosted nearly 150 beach clean-up days with employees and distributors from around Japan. On October 10, volunteers spent the day at Yaizu in the Shizuoka prefecture cleaning up the beach.

Children went on a “treasure hunt,” looking for small pieces of plastic and trash left on the beach. These tiny pieces might look unimportant, but they take many years to break down, contributing to pools of sludge and often causing harm to wildlife in and around the ocean that eat the pieces.

And the little pieces add up. Volunteers collected 34 kilograms (74 pounds) by the end of the day.

What a great impact on our environment … and a wonderful lesson for our children.

See more photos on the Amway Japan Facebook page.