For this final beach clean up for 2010, St Bernard College students at the Santa Monica campus visited a much more isolated stretch of the coast for their monthly beach clean up activity – the rock platforms and rocky beaches between Cathedral Rock and Grassy Creek.
Access to this stretch of coast is very limited so we found little evidence of rubbish left on the beaches. I also don’t think a clean up of this sort has been done for a very long time in this area. Hence, almost everything we collected was marine debris, washed up over a period of months and even years. You will notice that the data sheet is quite different from all the other ones we have completed – consisting mostly of polystyrene foam. 215 individual pieces of polystyrene foam filling four bags with this alone. The other major component was plastic bottles with a total of 79, the other unusual item was 30 pieces of electrical cabling. In total the students filled 8 bags with 570 bits of debris.
Tangaroa has been a great project for our students to be involved with again this year. We look forward to contributing further to the protection of our precious coastline in 2011.
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