Random thoughts on beach cleanup

Every month, we help to run a Community Beach Cleanup. I say "help" because although our NGO Robertsport Community Works organizes it, we're opening up leadership of the Saturday event to the wider community: local surfers, expatriate surfers, weekend beachgoers -- pretty much anyone who wants to volunteer.

Only here's the thing. After 30+ members of the community come together under the hot sun and walk down the beach picking up plastic with each other, here's what actually happens. We pile the rice bags, bulging with marine debris and local plastic waste, into the bag of the Nana's Lodge pick-up truck and it drives away.

Here's the thing. We take it to the local dump and...we dump it. We're picking up trash in one place and putting it someplace else. True, it's better in a dump than washing around the ocean, suffocating sea turtles who think plastic bags are jellyfish and clogging up fish gills. And to our credit, we separate the plastic marine debris from the other garbage.

It's that separation that, in a few months, just might pay off. I heard the World Bank is starting to fund a plastic recycling program. I'm not sure of the details, but it sounds like Chinese companies might be buying plastic waste to recycle. Our plastic would be almost perfect: sorted, clean and dry.

A big thank you to Nana's, who also pay for the meal our volunteers then enjoy -- usually a spicy mix of cassava leaf and dried fish served with rice in giant pots. Really, they're as wide as my sink -- I'll photograph the women cooking sometime.

The 1st Robertsport Community Beach Cleanup

Photos courtesy of Myles Estey.

On Saturday, 12 September, about 30 community members and expatriates met under the cotton tree at the Robertsport Community Campsite to participate in the first Robertsport Community Beach Cleanup. September's cleanup was part of the Ocean Conservancy's 24th International Coastal Cleanup -- the largest volunteer event in the world with over 400,000 volunteers in over 100 countries. The event raises awareness about the importance of clean beaches, oceans and waterways to human and environmental health.

Our goal was to collect plastic and marine debris from Fisherman's Point to Shipwrecks -- the main stretch of tourist and surfing beach. We gathered around 9 AM and by 10 AM had divided into teams lead by community members and RCW-sponsored surfers Alfred Lomax and Benjamin McCrumuda.
Each volunteer had a pair of thick leather work gloves and a rice bag to collect the trash, but the bags soon filled up and people began dumping the trash into a large pile at the campsite so that they could reuse their bags. This created a logistical challenge at the end, because we needed the trash in back in the rice bags to transport it to the dump, but it did create an impressive looking pile of plastic. We're scaling up our supplies for next month's cleanup and expect more volunteers as well.
We collected 28 rice bags in less than 2 hours -- over 500 pounds of trash. There were a large number of single-use plastic bags that, judging by the newish looking state they washed up in, are from around the Robertsport area. There was also a sizeable amount of older plastics that had broken and decomposed in the water. With the help of a marine biologist who is kindly guiding us, we're collecting data on the types and amount of marine debris collected -- data that will help us form intervention programs to reduce, reuse and recycle local waste in the future.

Every second Saturday around 10:00 am we'll be leading similar cleanups, so please join us or show your support by buying a $10 Cotton Tree t-shirt -- all the proceeds go to our environmental projects. Email me to get involved or pick up a shirt!

Beach Cleanup

One of the first actions of Roberstport Community Works will be to initiate a regular, highly visible, weekend beach cleanup. This cleanup will provide a half day of paid labor to at least six different community members. Since a growing amount of medical waste is washing up on the beaches of Robertsport, everyone in the cleanup crew will participate in a brief training that prepares them for handling glass, syringes or other potentially hazardous materials.

The cleanup crew will be chosen by the son of the community chief, who has expressed an intention to help us involve as many hardworking members of the community as possible. They will be provided with clearly labeled "Beach Cleanup" t-shirts in addition to leather gloves and trash bags--to remove any potential stigma that might pertain to picking up the trash of other people.

For the time being, we regret that no recycling options are available for our glass, metal and plastic refuse. In the coming months, we hope to partner with people and organizations who can help us discover what options exist for processing this waste in a sustainable fashion and how such options can be funded.