The Tangaroa Blue team joined forces with the Low Isles Preservation Society today for a beach clean up at Wangetti, a beach located half way between Port Douglas and Cairns. Volunteers were super energetic and the whole beach was cleaned in just a couple of hours – removing 2 bags and about 20kg of debris.
But with lots more energy left, the team decided they had time to drive just up the road to Pretty Beach and check on this litter hotspot. Used regularly by campers and party-goers this area is normally hit pretty hard with rubbish left by visitors. And today was no exception – 86.7kg removed, filling 10.5 bags with some larger items including a car seat, tyres and a outdoor furniture was collected.
Unfortunately at both these sites, the majority of rubbish had been left there by visitors and not washed up from somewhere else. There was also evidence of people chopping down trees for fires and toliet paper left everywhere – in fact more than 400 pieces strewn around the bush made the area look more like a public toliet than a beach.
Other items in the top 10 found during the event was over 900 pieces of broken glass, 160 pieces of plastic bag and film, 323 cigarette butts.
If you take it in – take it out, if there are no bins, or bins are full – take it home – this clean up showed that too many people that visit our beaches are just plain lazy when it comes to responsibility of their own rubbish – your mum isn’t following you around picking up your trash!
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