Beach Cleanup Project
By Clare Payne
On the 16th of January 2015, my class and the whole of year 8 went to North Plaza Beach also known as Sam Pak Wan Beach, in Discovery Bay to do a beach cleanup project. The company/organization that took us there was Plastic Free Seas. This organization promotes plastic free seas (hence the name) and wanted to take us on a trip to clean up a beach. We did this to help keep plastic out of the ocean, and collect and document what we found on the beach to see how much rubbish is in the ocean. Also we did this to keep the beach clean. Before we started this project, the week before we were told how much plastic is in the sea and how far it can travel!
During the beach cleanup project we were divided into groups & each class was put in a 1m2 section to collect and sort rubbish. We were put into jobs depending on our groups (in each class), these included collecting macro rubbish (Large Rubbish), collecting micro rubbish (Small Rubbish) and sorting and counting all the rubbish found. Overall the whole of year 8 collected 55Kilograms of Rubbish, out of this outstanding 55kg, 2.5 of it was recyclable! This is very interesting as when we went to the beach it looked very clean and neat, so imagine how much rubbish could be found if you were cleaning up a dirty beach! During this beach cleanup we did find some safety hazards but they were easily solved, the hazards included getting poked with needles and sharps, this was fixed by wearing highly protective gloves and full body coverage. In this report I am going to present the amount of macro and micro rubbish in graphs, explain where it came from and discuss the effects it has on the environment. I am also going to come up with some solutions to the problem of plastic in the sea.