Say Yes, to Clean Beaches

Bulli High School have recently taken part in our new program Kreative Koalas which  we piloted with Intrepid Landcare earlier this year. Yesterday I spent an inspirational afternoon with the Bulli High School Green Team.

Champion teachers Stacy Fraser and Rob Moore talk about the students that inspire them everyday 

On my way home, I felt like a roast dinner, so popped into ALDI to pick up their famous chicken with apricot and cranberry stuffing.  I have only just discovered ALDI as a place to shop after finding they have some great fitness gear on promotion from time to time

I thought I would grab some veggies whilst I was there and had a shock horror moment. My god ALDI is a soft plastics palace and for the fruit and veggies that weren’t wrapped in mountains of plastic there were no paper bags to be seen.

It made me sad.  I had spent two hours with 20 students who spend their Wednesday arvo cleaning up after the rest of us and our retailers aren’t making it easy for us to do the right thing. How do we work together to send clear messages to our retailers to say?

‘Work with us. We want to Make Australia Beautiful Again’

I was confident yesterday that if were all as committed as the Green Team it wouldn’t be hard. Let me share with you what the Green Team is doing in their sport allocated environmental clean up program through talking to the Champion Teachers Stacey Fraser and Rob Moore and some of the students

Bit of Background

Bulli High School is located in a ‘to die for’ location adjacent to Sandon Beach. The Green Team has adopted the beach as their Keep Australian Beautiful project.

They do this by clearing the rubbish out of the creek that is adjacent to their school, this reduces the rubbish in the storm water drains that flow onto the beach and they do regular clean up of the beach front itself

Here they are yesterday in time-lapse motion

The team was excited that despite this weeks heavy rain the beach had very little rubbish beyond a lot of cigarette buts and some soft plastics. This was until they discovered THE COUCH in the Lagoon

 

8,000 pieces of plastic are estimated to float in every square kilometre of ocean.

633 species worldwide including 77 Australian species are impacted by marine debris.

Over 75% of what is removed from our beaches is made of plastic. Source

Geography Teacher and Green Team partner. Stacey Fraser talks about some of the other Green Team projects and her inspiration for starting the program

Bulli High School have now joined the Tangaro Blue project and will be collecting, measuring,  monitoring and sharing their data  with the Australian Marine Debris Initiative database

Tangaroa Blue Foundation is an Australian-wide not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the removal and prevention of marine debris, one of the major environmental issues worldwide. But if all we do is clean-up, that is all we will ever do.

To successfully solve the problem, the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) was created, an on-ground network of volunteers, communities and organisations that contribute data from rubbish collected during beach and river clean-up events to the AMDI Database, and then work on solutions to stop the flow of litter at the source. The AMDI helps communities look after their coastal environment by providing resources and support programs, and collaborates with industry and government to create change on a large scale.

 

Lets Keep Australia beautiful together.jpg

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