Interested in garbage? What rubbish!
Researchers are interested in the make-up of the rubbish - what proportions can be attributed to smokers, drinkers, picnickers and fishermen - so the young people who regularly undertake the job, do more than just collect the debris.
A beach clean-up usually finishes with a pile of black bags left for the municipality to transport to the landfill. No one is particularly interested in what’s in the bags, so long as the rubbish is no longer on the beach.
But the Sunwich Port clean-ups, organised by Richard Green and Andrew Lange of the Surf Shop, are somewhat different. Researchers are interested in the make-up of the rubbish – what proportions can be attributed to smokers, drinkers, picnickers and fishermen – so the young people who regularly undertake the job, do more than just collect the debris. They analyse it as well.
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The junk collected recently had accumulated along the beach from the Damba river to Banana Beach in just two weeks, since the previous clean-up. The crew spread it all out behind the shop and sorted and counted it before sending it for recycling. There was quite a variety, from fishing line to liquor bottles, cardboard boxes to cigarette ends.
Andrew picked up a blue plastic drinking straw. “It doesn’t look very dangerous,” he said, “but turtles eat them by mistake and they die.”
Richard pointed out a pile of cardboard. “Fishermen just leave their bait boxes on the beach,” he said. Sure enough, most of the boxes were labelled ‘sardines’.
Glass, whether or not it contained alcohol, is an obvious danger on a beach; styrofoam is a problem on its own, as even the tidiest picnicker can lose a takeaway box to a gust of wind and cigarette butts – so small individually – add up to a pile of pollution when put together.
