Hundreds of plastic lids wash ashore
Hundreds of baby formula container lids baffled passers-by as they washed up along the shoreline near an industrial area in Lower Hutt.
Kaila McCreesh spent two hours on Friday picking up more than a thousand of the blue lids embossed with the Goldmax logo along the shoreline of Port Rd in Seaview.
‘‘It’s shocking really. Plastic is everyone’s problem. You see [it all the time] but because there was so much of it and it was all the same, I decided to get a bag and pick it up.
‘‘I’d like to know who bloody dropped them in there so I could go and return them.’’
There were many more lids out of her reach still floating in the harbour. She suspected they had either been dumped or washed out of a stormwater drain, as many of the lids were grouped around a water outlet.
A Goldmax spokesman said they had no factory or distribution centre in Lower Hutt and had no idea how the lids came to be in the harbour.
Greater Wellington Regional Council spokesman Stephen Heath said the situation was being treated as littering or dumping rather than pollution, and had contacted the Hutt City Council with regard to looking into the matter.
HCC has been approached comment.
The mystery surrounding the blue lids comes less than a week for after a beach clean-up group picked up more than 700 plastic straws from a 150-metre stretch of Petone Beach in front of the Wellington Water Ski Club.
Petone Beach Clean Up Crew coordinator Lorraine Shaarb said many hundreds more straws had not been put aside to be counted.
They had collected about a dozen rubbish bags worth of waste in 90 minutes.
She said it was disgusting, and called for local hospitality providers to follow the lead of the likes of restaurant Wagamama and the Wellington Hospitality Group, which in February said they planned to stop using plastic straws.
‘‘They are just unnecessary, it’s not going to kill anyone if we take the straws away. They only get used once and then get thrown away, and end up in places like this.’’
Niwa principal scientist in marine physics Craig Stevens said the large amount of rubbish grouped at the western end of Petone Beach indicated it was likely an ‘‘unfortunate sweet spot’’.
The straws and rubbish were likely wind-blown material which could have come from any of the populated areas around the harbour.
‘‘[The rubbish washing up] there suggests there is a focal point where surface water collects and washes up on shore.
‘‘It could be a focal point in Wellington Harbour for water circulation. That makes sense to me – being a corner it’s probably an unfortunate sweet spot.’’