A great beach cleaning effort

Sunday October 14th was the 12th Annual Beach clean up organised by Tangaroa Blue. A big thanks to Helen for liaising with Tangaroa and for her big efforts to bring us all together for a beach clean and marine creatures I.D session. Melissa from Town of Cottesloe taught us all about seagrasses and seaweeds, sponges, blue bottles and dead mans fingers and many other fascinating marine organisms. We were surprised that in a very short time we collected so much rubbish when we had only done a beach clean at the same site recently! Helen added this note to our Facebook page:

Thank you to all the families and volunteers that joined us at our beach clean up yesterday – we collected 32 kilos of rubbish in just 1 hour along South Cottesloe Beach and rescued a cormorant that had a fishing line stuck in its wing. Great job Tangaroa Blue, we are proud to be part of the 2016 WA Beach Clean Up.

The statistics below about Marine Debris are from the Tangaroa Blue website: 

18,000 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.

The kids ready to get to work

South Cottesloe beach cleaning team

All the willing volunteers

17 pairs sunglasses and 4 swim goggles

Melissa identifying some of the marine creatures from the sand. Then we returned them to the beach.

Broken-glass. How many cut feet did we protect! Thanks again Helen.