With the help of 28 dedicated volunteers, Port Douglas Coast Guard members and Department of Environment Rangers, over 587kg of marine debris filling 63 bags was removed from remote Cape Kimberley Beach on September 12th, 2010 to celebrate the Great Northern Clean Up.
Cape Kimberley beach is located at the mouth of the Daintree River, adjacent to Snapper Island and the Great Barrier Reef in Far North Queensland.
Volunteers joined the safety briefing at 9am, and then spent the next 5 hours collecting, sorting and documenting a mammoth 10,062 individual pieces of debris that had either washed up on the beach, or been left there by beach visitors.
The totals included 1283 lids and bottletops, 934 plastic drink bottles, 3430 broken pieces of hard plastic, 2679 pieces of polystyrene foam, 248 shoes and 93 cigarette lighters.
The most unusual finds were a television, a ship model in a light bulb, a baby’s potty toliet and over 30m of irrigation piping. Of concern were 4 sharps containers filled with syringes and the horrifying amount of plastic!
A huge thank you to all the volunteers for the hard work, also to the Port Douglas Coast Guard for assistance in transporting the bags of rubbish, to the Department of Environment and Resource Management for their quad bike and ranger assistance and the Cairns Regional Council for disposing of all the debris once collected.
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