St Bernard’s College students visiting their Santa Monica campus on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, headed out to a new site for their monthly beach clean-up activity in June. The mission for the activity was a massive clean-up of Johanna and Aire River beaches which are quite remote beaches open to the big swells and winds that batter the Otway coast.
We had 28 students and 5 staff taking part in the clean-ups over two days. There are some very rocky sections of the coastline here, which are perfect traps for ropes and netting. Some of the larger lengths had to be cut away from the rocks as they were heavily entangled. The broad stretches of open beach yielded more plastic, mostly in the form of twenty-cent-sized pieces, along with heaps of styrofoam. We will be checking this area again in a couple of months time to see how fast the debris is replenished at this site.
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