Plastic litter concern at beaches

Twenty bags worth of mostly plastic waste was picked up on Foxton Beach as part of the Community Beach Clean.

About 50 people volunteered their time to help tidy up the beach on Saturday in an event organised by Horizons Regional Council as part of Seaweek.

Seaweek is an annual campaign run by the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education with the hope of getting all Kiwis thinking more about the sea. It runs until Sunday March 11.

Council’s environmental educator Sarah Galley said there was a noticeable improvement on last year’s beach clean when they came across parts of car engine and the inside of a car door.

‘‘We ran a beach clean last year and we had quite a lot of large items – tyres and things like that. But we had a lot of small stuff, and small plastics were quite common,’’ she said.

There were about 30 bags collected in 2017.

Galley said Foxton Beach was fairly tidy.

‘‘The main part of the beach tends to be pretty clean. It is just usually the high-tide line where there is quite a lot that comes in, particularly after storms and things,’’ she said.

‘‘The Foxton community are pretty good at cleaning their beach. There are quite a lot of bins down there, so there should not be too much [rubbish].’’

There has been a focus this year on plastic waste, which was fitting considering 90 per cent of what volunteers collected on Saturday was small plastic waste.

‘‘One of the problems, particularly with small plastics, is that our birds and our marine animals think it is food.

‘‘When they have eaten it, they end up dying because they end up starving themselves because they have eaten the rubbish and they can’t get rid of it.’’

Galley said plastic waste was something that everybody could help reduce, especially things like single-use plastic bags and plastic straws.

Along with the beach clean, Horizons are running a Seaweek Selfie competition, which runs until March 19.

‘‘Some people can’t make the beach clean, so it is just about getting people out to whatever beach they can,’’ Galley said.