Celebrating Seaweek with a beach cleanup
An old car and a dead sheep were the more unusual finds during a beach cleaning effort yesterday.
About 150 people scoured Oreti Beach for rubbish, collecting bottles, plastic, rope and even car parts. The event was organised by Invercargill MP Sarah Dowie as a way to celebrate Seaweek.
Seaweek is hosted annually by the NZ Association for Environmental Education, which focuses on learning from the sea.
Dowie said Oreti Beach was an important resource and recreational area for the Invercargill community.
More than 70 students from Otatara School, Otatara Preschool and Aurora College helped clear the beach of rubbish.
Staff from the Department of Conservation also took part, along with staff from the Invercargill Z service stations.
Environment Southland supplied a trailer to take rubbish away, the Invercargill City Council supplied a rubbish chit so the rubbish disposal was free, and New World South City supplied gloves, hand sanitiser collecting rubbish.
One of the Otatara School pupils found a skeleton of what may have been a bird or musteloid, and there had also been a few jellyfish on the beach, along with broken glass up in the dunes, so the youngsters had had to take extra care, Dowie said.
The group cleaned south along the and bags for beach towards the New River Estuary, getting about a kilometre from the estuary before turning around, she said.
In total, about 170kg of rubbish was collected, mostly consisting of plastic, bottles, cans and rope.
A car was found in the dunes north of the main entrance, and volunteers were to return later to remove it, while another group had found a dead sheep.