Daniela Boerner, Ocean Shores
The other day my mum and I were walking along the beach at New Brighton towards the North Wall. What we discovered on our way was really disappointing and shocking.
Two mountains of rubbish probably of a weekend party on the beach 40 metres from the beach entrance. Glass bottles, cans, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toy pistols, left-over food, shoes, pieces of clothes.
Why are people still so irresponsible? If just one out of this group of people would have had the consciousness to bring some rubbish bags along and ask everyone to collect their stuff for the way home, what a difference it would have made.
Instead it gets dumped and washed into the ocean. Our ocean and its animals say thanks!
My mum and I couldn’t have taken all the rubbish along by ourselves. So at least we started to pile up everything onto one big stack and added what we could find scattered in the sand and among the dunes.
What a very lucky coincidence, when a wildlife ranger appeared at the beach entrance. I ran towards him to ask if he was a caretaker of the bushes and dunes. He returned with big black 80-litre rubbish bags and we filled up five of them.
Well, we were all happy the mess was taken care of so quickly, amazingly, we also found a still functional i-phone 4 in a white and transparent cover in the sand. Anyone want to have it back and take responsibility for being a polluter?
By the way, why does NSW not have a bottle-refund system?
People seem to care more for their money than for their environment. Surely the majority would make more effort to take bottles back, in order to save money.
Or people who are in need of some more pocket money would happily collect the neglected thrown out bottles, cans, etc in return for some cash exchange.
The system works successfully for many many years in other countries. And it helps to keep our beaches, waters, forests and cities cleaner.
