The team from Smithfield Shopping Centre took to Palm Cove Beach early on the 21st of May to strip the beach of ever last piece of litter they could find, and submit the data to the Australian Marine Debris Initiative database.
The data submitted for this particular clean up event would be the first ever for this particular beach, and as such we were very interested to see what was found!
The beach at Palm Cove is a very high traffic beach, and after chatting with one of the local lifeguards, we found that we were not the first that day to have taken to the beach, bags in hand, with the intention of removing marine debris.
The beach appears to be regularly patrolled by various members of the public, who take it upon themselves to keep the beautiful beaches of tropical north QLD the paradises that they are.
This meant that the Smithfield Shopping Centre team had a real challenge, as most of the larger more obvious items had obviously been removed by previous beach cleaners, their mission was to find and remove every last tiny scrap of rubbish off the beach.
Along with all the usual suspects found on high traffic tourist beaches such as plastic cutlery, straws and cups, the team found a whopping 228 cigarette butts extinguished and discarded in the sand.
The data collected from this clean up event will be very useful as comparative baseline data for all future clean ups conducted at Palm Cove beach. So a big thanks to the Smithfield Shopping Centre beach clean up team for getting the ball rolling at Palm Cove, and an even bigger thank you for their hard work and dedication to protecting our marine environment.
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