It began in 2017 when Susan Baur, a retired psychologist from Falmouth on Cape Cod, grew tired of swimming through other people's rubbish and roped in some friends. Somebody joked that they were a bunch of old ladies against underwater garbage, and the name stuck, capital letters and all. To join you must be a woman of at least sixty four, able to swim half a mile in under thirty minutes and dive to eight feet, and the club now surveys and cleans around twenty ponds a year. Six thousand pounds of sunken rubbish have come up in their hands. Susan is eighty six now, still swimming, and this month a documentary about the club is showing at the Woods Hole Film Festival.
Here is the part we love most: you do not need a wetsuit or a birthday to join in, you only need to start within your capacities. A bag in your pocket on a morning walk. A small mesh bag and a pair of gloves next time you snorkel, lifting one bottle on your way back to the beach. Keep yourself safe out there, never dive alone, and let the little part you carry home count, because it does. More ways to pitch in are appearing all the time, and in the meantime, as the old ladies have proven six thousand pounds over, a little part goes a very long way.
Our short take: the club is covered by Boston 25 News and the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, and the documentary Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage screened at the Woods Hole Film Festival in 2026. Photograph: Unsplash.