The history of the West Australian Beach Clean-up is as old as Tangaroa Blue itself: for the 11th consecutive year, over 1,200 volunteers removed more than 5.5 tons of rubbish from the beaches of WA in October last year. A big thank you to Coastwest for the loyal funding all this time! We’ve finally crunched all the numbers and released the 015 WA Beach Clean-Up Report!
It is time to stir the game up a little bit. For 11 years, the residents of WA proved to be committed and by now well trained beach warriors feeding a great deal of data into the Australian Marine Debris Database. Now we want to give you something back: In this year’s report we have bundled the data outcomes of the previous years into Natural Resource Management (NRM) Regions.
For each area you are now provided with a detailed analysis of the most common items, groups of litter sources (e.g. local litter, recreational fishing, shipping) and suggestions what item groups you could tackle first if you were to implement an action plan. You can also use this knowledge as a foundation for Source Reduction Plan workshops where you bring your community and stakeholders together to formulate a mitigation strategy for certain items. In this way the 2015 WA Beach Clean-up Report functions as a tool for change, assisting anyone who wants to take action. We suggest that you run those workshops on regional or NRM levels where you can make a real difference.
The 2016 WA Beach Clean-up will be held over the weekend of October 15 & 16 and is supported by funding from the Western Australian Government’s State NRM Program, Royalties for Regions, and Keep Australia Beautiful WA. If you want to get involved contact renee@tangaroablue.org.
Published by