Bryan Galvin and Heather Bolint of Plastic Symptoms with a few days haul of trash from the Palm Beach County coastline. ▲ Bryan Galvin, left, Diane Buhler and Heather Bolint pose Monday atop a massive chunk of plastic that washed up on Palm Beach. The plastic is believed to be from a Spanish fishing boat. [Wendy Rhodes/palmbeachdailynews.com] ▲ Plastic bottles from Haiti wash up on the shores of Palm Beach. This one shows the teeth marks of fish who mistook it for food. [Wendy Rhodes/palmbeachdailynews.com] ▲ Heather Bolint shows a bird's skull entangled in a plastic fishing line, which likely drowned it. [Wendy Rhodes/palmbeachdailynews.com] ▲

Bryan Galvin and Heather Bolint spent the day Monday picking up trash along the shores of Palm Beach. It was day 32 of their planned 1,200-mile trek around the coast of Florida's mainland.

The pair, who are part of the group Plastic Symptoms, began March 1 in Fernandina Beach, northeast of Jacksonville. They plan to keep going until they reach the Florida-Alabama line in about three months.

"The less developed beaches have a lot more littler on them," Bolint, who is from Lake Worth, said of the shoreline they have seen so far. "Like the north tip of Jupiter Island — what a mess. We physically couldn't carry all the trash we found."

RELATED: Read more about their journey here

Galvin, 28, and Bolint, 32, both have broken toes from this journey. Galvin walks barefoot and is missing a toenail. Still, they trudge on, stuffing their burlap sacks with straws, cups, bags, toys, medicine bottles, blood vials and even needles.

Each day they pick up about 30 to 40 pounds of trash, mostly plastic, they say. But don't call what the pair is doing a "beach clean-up." That term, they say, misses the point of their mission.

"I realized, if we could just stop producing this plastic, we could get ahead of it," Galvin, who is from Delray Beach, said of the importance of stopping the demand for single-use plastics at its source: consumers. "Until then, we are just creating a futile movement in cleaning the beaches that won't solve anything."

It is a sentiment with which local activist Diane Buhler agrees.

"The heartbreaking part, the part that keeps me coming back, is that you can clean a beach and leave it pristine and the next day it's totally covered again," said Buhler, whose organization, Friends of Palm Beach, collects about 30,000 pounds of trash annually from area beaches.

Buhler met Galvin and Bolint on Monday to clean the beach and talk about what can be done to curb the amount of plastic washing ashore each day. Buhler also wants to help the activists meet others who may be able to help them along in their journey.

RELATED: Friends of Palm Beach finds medical waste on island's beaches

The pair rely on donations and the kindness of others to find places to sleep each night. Each day, they park their car wherever their walk is to begin and then must find a ride back to their truck with the day's haul.

It is then that some of their most important work begins. They sort, count, categorize and photograph the plastic — information that then becomes part of a huge international database called Open Litter Map.

"It's important because it's open data, so everyone can use it and can grab the data," Galvin says of the database, which unlike some others, is public.

With information about how much and what types of plastics are washing up in specific areas, the two say, organizations are better equipped to face the challenge of how to deal with the massive amounts of plastics that are littering beaches, killing sea life, throwing off the delicate balance of the ecosystem and, ultimately, hurting humans.

For now, Bolint and Galvin are geotagging the location of plastics as they go and then leaving the bags with local activists in each community. They hope the final tally will persuade government officials in Florida to begin the process of banning single-use plastics.

In the meantime, they will continue to collect the trash in burlap bags because they say they do not want to contribute to the plastic problem while trying to solve it.

"As long as we keep saying that it's OK to use plastic for this or that, or when it's convenient, that's where our plastic problem came from," Galvin said of what he calls a common problem of attempting to clean plastic with plastic.

He also said that while picking up litter is a good thing, there is something even better that those who want to help clean the beaches can do.

"Refuse plastic at the store in the first place," he says. "We can get it out of the environment by stopping the demand."

For more information or to help out, visit PlasticSymptoms.org.

@WendyRhodesFL