TAMPA, Fla. — It’s the morning after Gasparilla and you find yourself still weighed down with all those beads.<\/p>\n
So what do you do with all of them?<\/p>\n
As it turns out, they can reused, recycled and repurposed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there is important information for you to know before you dispose of them.<\/p>\n
Keep Tampa\u2019s waterways bead-free, and remember that throwing beads or any other items in the water is prohibited according to Florida Statute 403.413.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beads and other non-biodegradable items are harmful to the environment and pose serious threats to marine wildlife. They take a thousand years to break down into smaller pieces called microplastics, which never decompose.<\/p>\n
Beads can be reused year after year keeping them out of the waste stream<\/a> and more importantly, out of the bay. Cleaned and sanitized beads are packaged and sold back to parade crews for other City events.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, the Florida Aquarium is once again partnering with the City of Tampa<\/a> on the\u00a0Bead-Free Bay<\/a>\u00a0initiative. The effort turns a fun tradition into a meaningful way to protect the environment while supporting conservation and community programs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. — It’s the morning after Gasparilla and you find yourself still weighed down with all those…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[115,275,135,137,136],"class_list":["post-138977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-news","tag-spectrum-news-staff","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}