PORTSMOUTH — Dozens of volunteers, armed with trash-pickers, rubber gloves, bags and notepads, turned out to clean up Pheasant Beach on the west side of town on a sunny Saturday.

The cleanup, coming just two days after Earth Day, was the first of the year hosted by the nonprofit Clean Ocean Access (COA) at the beach.

Volunteers had been doing their own thing and scouring the community for trash before that, however.

“All of the weekend cleanups that we usually do were sort of on pause from January through March,” said Eva Touhey, COA program manager. “We were doing week-long flexible cleanups instead. So, we were still addressing the debris issues, but in a more socially distant way.”

A flexible cleanup is when an individual or family adopts a small section of coastline, watershed or neighborhood, and performs a cleanup on a flexible schedule. COA provides all the supplies.

Although volunteers on Saturday collected some of the typical larger items that are often discarded on or around local beaches — a mattress here, a tire there — there hasn’t been as much heavy lifting since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Ms. Touhey said.

“It’s a lot of litter,” she said. “What we’ve been finding the last couple of years at our cleanups is that the pounds of debris have decreased, but the items of trash have actually increased. We’re finding a lot more littler overall, like food wrappers and bottles.”

The pandemic has also contributed its own brand of trash.

“This year we’re seeing the PPE — face masks and hand wipes and masks. We included that on our tally sheet last June, so we have been collecting data on that,” she said.

For more information about COA, its mission, how to volunteer and upcoming events, visit www.cleanoceanaccess.org.