NEW HANOVER COUNTY — One local environmental group is aiming to help keep coastal environments cleaner with new technology. While navigating permitting challenges, their end goal is to amplify community engagement in addressing beach pollution and foster greater public responsibility for the health of the shoreline.
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More than just a beach-cleaning robot, Keep New Hanover Beautiful’s BeBot serves as a unique and visible catalyst for change. The robot cleans up litter and has been utilized so far in Carolina and Wrightsville beaches for under two years. Last year, it cleaned over 100,000 square feet of beach overall, but hopes to expand along the North Carolina coast.
“It’s kind of like pushing a rock up a hill for us, which we’ve been successful at so far and been able to do these things, especially with Carolina Beach, but the rock still needs to be pushed up in many other spaces for us to be able to expand out,” Veda Lewin, Vice President of Keep New Hanover Beautiful, said of permitting struggles.
The BeBot’s deployment has encountered permitting hurdles, primarily due to existing regulations not being tailored for advanced, low-impact technology.
To take the BeBot onto the beach for cleaning, Keep New Hanover Beautiful has to obtain a Coastal Area Management Act minor permit and Department of Environmental Quality beach-raking permit, in addition to getting permission from local municipalities.
“The state won’t process the application unless the municipality is on board first, but the municipality would like us to have the state permit first,” Keep New Hanover Beautiful Executive Director Dick Brightman explained. “Then it kind of turns into this hamster wheel where we’re just kind of stuck.”
As a result, the BeBot was out on the beaches five times last year. It takes more than a month to get permits on average.
Brightman added current legislation was not written with technology like BeBot in mind. He explained existing state regulations are antiquated, designed for traditional beach-cleaning machinery rather than low-impact robots. While there isn’t a clear regulatory pathway specifically for devices like the BeBot, Brightman said the DEQ has been understanding of the technology, acknowledging it isn’t a traditional beach rake.
(Port City Daily contacted the DEQ for comment on its permitting process for technology not covered by current regulations; a response wasn’t received by press, but this will be updated upon contact.)
“We’ve done demos in the DEQ parking lot,” Lewin said, “demos for both municipal governments on Carolina Beach and Wrightsville Beach. What’s made the difference is them being able to actually get involved with it and see that it’s not a tank, something that’s coming and demolishing the shoreline.”
The BeBot, acquired by Keep New Hanover Beautiful in 2023, is a 1,300 pound, manually-operated beach-cleaning robot. Also dubbed “Robot DeNiro,” it works by dragging a rake approximately 4 inches below the sand’s surface, where smaller debris often settles. In contrast, a traditional beach rake pulled by a tractor can dig up to 6 inches, making BeBot a less disruptive option when it comes to sand erosion and wildlife protection.
It works like this: BeBot’s rake pushes sand onto a grate, allowing clean sand to fall through, back onto the shoreline, while trapping litter. The collected trash is then deposited into a rear bin for disposal.
Items most commonly trapped include small plastics, such as bottlecaps, food wrappers and cups, as well as cigarette butts. With a sifting width of about 51 inches, the BeBot runs up to three hours on an eight-hour charge, augmented by solar panels for air pollution-free operation.
Lewin explained the BeBot’s less invasive design sets it apart considerably from a traditional large beach rake. It has a more environmentally friendly, gentle-cleaning approach, solar-powered and quietly operates, causing significantly less sand compaction and disturbance than heavy, fuel-powered machinery.
“This is not impacting in any negative way and I would not stand behind something that I felt was,” said Lewin, who has a master’s degree in coastal resource protection.
By comparison, Carolina Beach’s Public Works Department primarily uses large, tractor-pulled rakes, which weigh close to 2 tons, for maintenance, though sea turtle restrictions limit these operations to just a few times annually. The BeBot also has to adhere to sea turtle nesting season restrictions; from May 1 to August 31 deep raking of the sand is prohibited to avoid disturbing or destroying nests and eggs.
“I agree these protections need to be in place and I’m happy that the project is difficult to get through the regulations,” Lewis said, “especially with the turtle populations that we have here.”
Supplementing Carolina Beach’s beach cleanup is also the volunteer group CB Trash Walkers, who organize regular litter collections along the strand, often on Wednesdays. A high-tech addition to these efforts is the BeBot, last deployed on Carolina Beach on June 10 and 11.
According to Carolina Beach Mayor Lynn Barbee, the BeBot often draws in beachgoers whenever it goes out and the results so far have been promising.
“There’s two pieces to it — one is it picks up the trash, but two is it also brings awareness to the trash left behind,” Barbee said. “It might not be the end all be all, but if we can be a little better tomorrow and can continue to improve, we can really reduce the waste that gets into the ocean.”
Barbee said the Town of Carolina Beach is open to purchasing its own robot in the future; the robots cost roughly $80,000.
Keep New Hanover Beautiful hopes to expand the BeBot’s reach into neighboring beach communities like Topsail Beach next, seeking to spread litter prevention awareness eventually throughout the Atlantic coast.
“Being able to partner with them and talk to their municipalities and be able to get the word into their communities too,” Brightman said.
The organization is dedicated to litter prevention, waste reduction, recycling, and beautification throughout the southeastern North Carolina region. It prominently features its advanced beach cleaning robot in community engagement and educational programs to help promote awareness. For instance, Keep New Hanover Beautiful held a field day with New Horizons Elementary School in March. Brightman said third-through-fifth-graders could see how BeBot operated.
Despite its impressive capabilities, the BeBot alone cannot eradicate beach pollution. Brightman and Lewin said lasting change requires a deeper shift in how people interact with the beaches they enjoy, recognizing technology is a tool for awareness, not a complete replacement for human responsibility.
“Is this machine going to solve beach pollution and beach litter? No, absolutely not,” Lewin said.
However, she said beachgoers, especially children, learn by merely seeing BeBot at work. In a previous outing, she explained a group of kids tailed behind the robot for two hours, fascinated by its ability to find trash hidden beneath the sand.
“So it’s more than the machine picking up litter, it’s talking to people about what it’s collecting and bringing attention to it,” Lewin said.
Brightman explained much of the beach’s pollution goes unnoticed by the casual visitor.
“They probably know there’s cans left behind, but they don’t know about the cigarette butts or the bottle caps,” he said.
Pollutants often include tiny, seemingly innocuous items, such as the plastic tabs from new clothing, which can easily drop into the sand unnoticed.
“It’s kind of like death by a thousand cuts,” Lewin said. “Say you bring a Publix sandwich out to the beach, you remember to wrap up the leftovers of your sandwich in the wrapping paper, but the little tab of your mustard packet, you dropped it, and it flew away in the wind. That’s the kind of thing that we’re picking up, so a bird doesn’t eat it, so a turtle doesn’t eat it.”
One of the most frequently found pollutants around New Hanover are cigarette butts. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cigarette butts are the most common form of marine litter. In addition to the BeBot project, Keep New Hanover Beautiful has managed a cigarette butt recycling program since 2017 with over 400 cigarette receptacles at 64 sites around the county.
Since the program’s inception, the group has sent approximately 3 million cigarette butts or roughly 1.5 tons to be recycled into hard plastic pellets and plastic lumber. According to recycler TerraCycle, Keep New Hanover Beautiful ranks in the top 10 as one of the top cigarette butt recyclers in the country, among the likes of large cities and corporations, including Amazon warehouses.
Nearly two years after the BeBot made its maiden voyage on Carolina Beach, KNHB is focusing their attention on a new social media campaign highlighting the organization, its members and volunteers, and the often-unseen pollutants the BeBot targets. It’s urging beachgoers to adopt a “pack-in, pack-out” mentality.
“It really resonates with people and it lands when they’re camping,” Lewin stated. “I think if we were able to translate that mentality to going to the beach for the day it’s essentially the same thing.”
The campaign aims to shift the public mindset, moving beyond the idea of “someone else will clean it up.”
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