How the Seaside Scavenge is inspiring Australia to turn trash into treasure at their waterway cleanup events.
Last weekend we participated in one of the coolest cleanup events we’ve ever been involved in, and if you’ve been following us for a while now, you’d know we’ve been to a few!
It’s different from most cleanup events. Quite genius, in fact.
This is how it works…
First, grab a rubbish bag
Or in the case of last weekend, grab a reused malt bag from Your Mates.
Shout out to Debbie and Poppy Ives from local cleanup group, Visionary Ocean Warrior, who provided us with the opportunity to donate 50 malt bags for the rubbish collection!
Check out Mcgarry holding one of these bags, plus a repurposed carry bag, made by the lovely team at Boomerang Bags. More info on these coming soon...
Next, collect rubbish from the surrounding area
The beautiful Bulcock Beach was our clean up location, a great local spot. It was already very clean which was awesome to see. We did, however, find some micro plastics and cigarette butts, the usual suspects.
Time to cash in!
We took our rubbish bag to the collection tent, run by the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, for sorting and weighing. We walked away with two purchase tokens, cash money baby!
Shop til you drop, trash into treasure
With our tokens in hand, we browsed through a tonne of fantastic pre-loved items at the pop-up market. All of these items were donated by the local community. There were books, clothes, toys, board games and all kinds of treasures. We walked away with a couple of nice hats for our next adventure.
That’s not all the event had to offer either
Debbie Ives, from the aforementioned Visionary Ocean Warrior group, was the organiser of this successful event and said the aim was to “target the wider community who have never been on a beach clean before.”
The presence of NGOs, plastic-free workshops, marine talks and live music were additions to achieve this goal, she said.
Reef Check Australia was one of the participating NGOs. This group empowers ‘citizen scientists’ to survey and monitor the health of our local reef systems.
General manager, Jodi Salmond, was participating at the Scavenge and said clean up events like this one are ‘integral components’ for the Sunshine Coast community.
“They offer an opportunity for the community to come together, learn about community groups working in the area, get involved in actively cleaning up key locations, and sharing the experience with others,” she said.
“It offers the perfect occasion to facilitate wider collaboration. When we work together, our impact is exponential, and that's what we are all about; changing the world by helping each other.”
Overall the event saw 200 butts, 400 soft plastic remnants, fishing wire and bait bags, weighing in at 26kg, removed from the environment and traded in for treasure.
A fantastic result, cheers to all involved!