For beautiful beaches
SYRINGES, flip-flops, broken plastic and a tyre — these are the commonly seen items of litter polluting the TRNC’s most beautiful beaches, and were among the 56 sacks of rubbish collected by volunteers in a beach clean at Tatlısu’s Sea Terra Bay.
In an initiative organised by expat scuba diving instructor Jewells Stott, 30 people took to the beach on Monday and left the sacks for municipality garbage trucks to pick up a couple of days later. Mrs Stott wants to make it a regular activity and invites more volunteers to join her.
The group staged their first beach clean at Esentepe on March 24, collecting 46 sackfuls of mostly plastic rubbish, weighing a staggering 184 kilos, in a one-and-a-half-hour blitz.
“Cyprus can be very pretty if people stopped throwing rubbish,” said Mrs Stott, who moved to North Cyprus from south-west London 11 years ago.
The Esentepe resident and great-grandmother of two also informed global environmental movement 4Ocean of their actions and was tracked by them via GPS. According to 4Ocean, which organises and monitors litter cleans in the ocean and on coastlines, at current rates “by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans”.
“Most of the rubbish seems to be washed up from the sea. We used a rake to pick the broken pieces of plastic,” said Mrs Stott.
A scuba instructor of six years, the 61-year-old also retrieves rubbish from the ocean while diving.
The next clean-up is tomorrow at Sea Terra Bay, from 2pm. Organisers issued the following directions: “Coming from Girne, turn left on to the old coastal road just before the T-junction, [then] take a left on to a road leading to Kıbrıs Gardens. After 1km, park at a dirt road on the right before an old combine harvester. Participants can enjoy a dip in the sea and a barbecue afterwards.”
Another follows on Friday, meeting in front of Sea Breeze Restaurant in Küçük Erenköy, at 10am, where Mehmet and Claire Demirtaş are offering a free meze afterwards for the volunteers.
Participants should bring their own rubbish sacks. For more information, call Mrs Stott on 0533 843 4765.