Last week, Cape Byron Rudolf Steiner School class 9 undertook a beach clean up.
To kick off our community service-themed year, a bunch of 14 and 15 year olds in colourful sun hats, gardening gloves, with oversized collection bags walked from Main Beach to Belongil, tasked with picking up as much rubbish as we could.
We embarked on this thinking we would be greeted by fairly clean golden sands, picking up only a handful of microplastics and the occasional cigarette butt. Boy, were we wrong!
In just one hour we collected 24kg of rubbish, an average of 1kg per person in our class.
Cigis most common
Along with countless cans, glass bottles and a zillion cigarette butts, we found odd shoes, a discarded doormat, unopened boxes of menstrual products, loads of stinking take away containers and a fairly good pair of sunglasses that just needed a clean. The overwhelmingly common item were cigarette butts – even more upsetting was knowing it is illegal to smoke on our beaches.
While we enjoyed the feeling of helping our marine life and environment, we also felt disappointed by how careless people are with their rubbish and how unaware we still are despite the dire state our world is in.
In writing this article, we want to bring awareness to the harm we are causing our marine life by neglecting our responsibilities to pick up after ourselves. We left the beach with garbage bags overflowing, a certain level of frustration with our community, but also with a sense of hope that we can do better.
Twenty-four kilos of rubbish
And what of that 24kg of rubbish we found?
Rather than add to landfill, we have sorted and washed and are in the throes of planning an artwork with the salvageable garbage to remind us that what we use and what we then do with it matters.
Arabelle Manousis and Amelia Close are in class 9 at Cape Byron Rudolf Steiner School.
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