Students in Grade 6 & 7 from St Augustine’s Primary School in Mossman have been learning about marine debris in class and last week Heidi Taylor from Tangaroa Blue visited the school to give a presentation about marine debris along the Queensland coast.
Today, 22 students and their teacher Mr Mullane, visited Cooya Beach, their local stretch of coastline to see what marine debris they could find while participating in a beach clean up.
In just one hour students removed over 105 kilograms of debris from the shoreline, helping to keep their local beach clean!
Students collected a total of 1815 items, weighing 105 kilograms and filling 9 clean up bags, with other items including a matress, chairs and a ladder too big to be place in bags.
The most common item removed was broken pieces of alcohol drink bottles, with 1071 pieces found, showing that this section of coast is impacted by visitors throwing their drink bottles into the shrubs instead of taking them home with them.
Students also removed 78 glass drink bottles and 143 aluminium cans, 48 lids and bottletops, 63 food wrappers and 96 metres of fishing line.
All rubbish bags were taken to the local tip with everything possible being recycled and the larger items being picked up by the local shire.
Well done to the students and we look forward to the St Augustine’s being involved in more beach projects in 2010.
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