WA Beach Clean-up Site Registration Form
Good on you! We are so pleased to have you join the fun by registering your own site for the WA Beach Clean-up. Please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
Good on you! We are so pleased to have you join the fun by registering your own site for the WA Beach Clean-up. Please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
Our annual west coast event is fast approaching and it’s shaping up to be another really successful campaign for Tangaroa Blue Foundation!! For those of you who missed the official WA Beach Clean-Up report for 2020, here is a snapshot of the key successes. We hope to increase our impact this year and keep building on these numbers. Thank you to everyone who has participated in this event so far and for your interest again this year.
Register your clean-up site here!
Check out the clean-up sites registered so far… can you fill in the gaps?
We have recently welcomed WA Regional Project Coordinator Casey Woodward to the team, who is based in the South West. Together with Dan Burns in Perth, they are working to increase the beaches and waterways covered and are both really looking forward to connecting to the communities that care for the wild shores of Western Australia over the 15th-18th October weekend.
Alongside our partner Keep Australia Beautiful WA, we are welcoming Custom builder Tallwood Constructions to our corporate donor base. Their generous contribution provides valuable funding to the WA Beach Clean-Up for 2021 and we are proud to be growing our capacity in Western Australia, with their help. We will share more about these partners throughout the campaign.
We are also getting together some incredible prizes to be offered up to volunteers across the state to thank you for your hard work and dedication to keeping our oceans and waterways debris free!
If anyone has any questions or requires further information regarding this event, please feel free to reach out to casey@tangaroablue.org.
Join ReefClean’s Great Barrier Reef Clean-up!
Are you a citizen scientist who is concerned about the health of the Great Barrier Reef? Maybe a school or community group who would like to monitor the health of the Great Barrier Reef? Or are you a member of the local government, and would like to lead by example by becoming actively involved in contributing to the overall health of one of the most biologically diverse environments on this planet? Well then continue reading!
This October marks the start of our month-long series of events that focus on looking after our Reef. Tangaroa Blue Foundation, through the ReefClean Project is calling all ocean lovers to participate in the Great Barrier Reef Clean-Up. A number of flagship events will be held over the course of the month in the following locations:
To volunteer at a Flagship location, please click here.
This coming October will be our third year coordinating the Great Barrier Reef Clean-Up month! Ocean lovers from all over the GBR have generously contributed just over 9,000 hours of their time which has resulted in just under 14 tonnes of debris removed during the previous GBRCU events in October.
The Great Barrier Reef Clean-Up is not limited to these flagship events, so make sure you monitor our events for more opportunities to get involved! The program also invites groups to adopt and register their own coastal or waterway sites to be cleaned throughout the month, so if you know of a site in your area that needs attention, we encourage you to register that site and get a group together.
Click here to register your own site.
ReefClean is funded by the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and delivered by Tangaroa Blue Foundation in partnership with AUSMAP, Capricornia Catchments, Eco Barge Clean Seas, OceanWatch Australia, Reef Check Australia, and South Cape York Catchments.
Join the Great Barrier Reef Clean-up today!
In the final week of July, a very excited crew of volunteers and staff headed up to Chili Beach to conduct the annual clean-up… for the 10th year in a row! The Chili Beach clean-up has a great history of community working together in Caring for Country, and the seed was planted 10 years ago with a group of school children.
In 2011, local man Greg Westcott coordinated a clean-up day with the students of Lockhart River State School and Cook Shire, QPWS and the Lockhart River Shire. This is the second year that he’d organised this successful event and Heidi, CEO of Tangaroa Blue Foundation, attended the event to provide support for data collection and work with the Lockhart River Ranger team.The following year, Tangaroa Blue supported a crazy idea to expand the clean-up to a five day event to clean the whole beach. With a team of 11 volunteers, QPWS Rangers and the students from Lockhart River School, the whole beach was cleaned for the first time! The only thing that was able to be fully counted was 4,700 thongs, which marked the beginning of the Golden Thong Award!
Over the next 10 years, the support from the community continued to grow with involvement every year from Lockhart locals, Biosecurity officers, Border Force Australia, Traditional Owners, QPWS and Kuuku Ya’u Rangers and of course many, many volunteers.
This year, as we arrived to set up camp we were greeted with an already large pile of debris which had been collected by Tangaroa Blue staff member Ian and his brother in law, who had arrived a week earlier to tackle the Southern end of the beach.
On day one, the tides were in our favour to head down to the most dense area of the beach, south of the tree line. In these areas you’re picking up rubbish in the same metre for minutes on end wondering how you’re ever going to cover the whole beach! Despite the mammoth task ahead, the volunteers were all smiles on the first day of the clean-up, including Mr Happy, who was glad to be rescued from the ocean. A massive thanks to the travelers and Lockhart River locals who came to lend a hand in the dense Southern end of the bay as well.
As the week progressed the data team had a great system going, fueled by good tunes and enthusiastic volunteers. Janice did an amazing job of counting hard plastic remnants, a task that very little people can do given the sheer and consistent number of them. Leslie was the Consumer Item Queen!
We were joined by Efren, from QPWS, as well as Cameron, Branden and Horton from the Kuuku Ya’u Aboriginal Corporation, which meant more hands on deck! Campers in the area also took a couple of bags each to the beach and loaded them up for us.
At the end of the week the ever-enthusiastic kids from Lockhart State School joined us for a day, picking up the final bits of marine debris and bringing our total in at just over 3 tonnes. That’s a whopping 36 tonnes collected from Chili Beach in a decade!
To celebrate 10 years of cleaning up together Tangaroa Blue gifted the community a storyboard, which will be displayed in the school, at the Kuuku Ya’u Aboriginal Corporation office and the art gallery in town.
Thank you so much to everyone for once again making this an awesome trip!! We’d also like to extend a massive thankyou to Aunty Lucy and Aunty Norma for taking the time to come out and visit us during a very difficult time in the community. We send our well wishes to Gary who has been an incredible supporter of this event over the years but could not make it this time, and look forward to coming together again next year to kick off the next decade of keeping this beautiful part of the country clean.
We would like to acknowledge the Kuuku Ya’u people (including the Kungkay people and Kanthanampu people) as the Traditional Owners of Kutini-Payamu National Park, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
Tangaroa Blue Foundation has been successful in securing funding for Let’s Strain the Drains – Phase 2 through the Recycling Victoria Communities Fund, delivered by Sustainability Victoria on behalf of the Victorian Government. The project will be delivered by Tangaroa Blue Foundation in partnership with Cleanwater Group and with support from the Cities of Melbourne, Wyndham, Hobsons Bay, Moreland, Kingston, Maribyrnong & Greater Dandenong, the Vicinity Centres and University of New South Wales.
Let’s Strain the Drain projects aim to close the gap in information around the specific land-based sources of plastic and other debris leaking into the environment. This is achieved by sorting & counting the debris caught in at-source litter traps installed in stormwater infrastructure using the Australian Marine Debris Initiative methodology.