Join us on Saturday, March 6th at 9am when the Wollongong community comes together for Clean Up Australia Day to do a massive beach clean that includes a seabed sweep of Wollongong Harbour. 

Whether you want to jump in with a snorkel, surfboard or kayak in the water, or if keeping dry on land is more your thing, we invite you join us to get our harbour sparkling clean. As we are limited to numbers because of Covid-19 restrictions, all volunteers will be assigned to small groups. 

While it is great for the community to come together on occasions like this, we will forever be cleaning up unless we start to change our habits. There are gadgets and nets and bins and mechanical arms floating out in our oceans that are collecting the floating plastic in the ocean, but all of these ideas are reactive – we have to be proactive to solve the plastic marine pollution problem. 

So what can we, as individuals, do to stop the
2 billion tonnes of waste that we collectively produce each year? The first thing is to wean ourselves off our convenient lifestyle and start doing our bit for the planet. Refuse plastic. If we think it can all be recycled we are kidding ourselves. Things are made too cheaply so they hold little value – if they break, we replace. And this is the essence of the problem. 

France has just started a rating system whereby an item is scored according to its ability to be repaired. Some supermarkets are starting to reduce their single-use plastic, but we need to put more pressure on them to totally eliminate plastic. After all, we will be eating and breathing it if we don’t get serious. We ingest (on average) 5g of microplastics each week; tiny plastic particles are found in the foods we eat, our salt, our beer, our placentas. We are talking about endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we are unknowingly breathing in, chewing on and putting in our bodies. 

Supermarkets in the UK are eliminating plastics from their grocery shelves; why is it taking Australia so long to follow suit? Just because we can’t see the tiny plastic microfibres, microbeads and microplastic particles, doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing damage to us and the environment. 

Every time we do a load of washing we are unintentionally polluting our oceans. If we simply stopped buying polyester, acrylic and fast fashion clothing we could improve things considerably. A good washing machine filter can capture up to 95% of microfibres, however, until each household has one installed, we will continue to litter the seabed with fibres from our fleeces and yoga pants.

Let’s start writing to our MPs. Plastic is a pollutant and will be with us forever unless we change our ways. Plastic never breaks down, it just keeps on breaking up and enters the web of life, the very one that we rely on.