MOSSEL BAY NEWS - "We are appealing to Mossel Bay residents to spend 10 minutes picking up trash on their local beach this Valentine's weekend."
As part of the international #HearttheOceans event hosted by Society for Conservation Biology, Keep Fin Alive campaign founder Esther Jacobs Overbeeke is organising a beach clean-up with Oceans Research and their interns. They will be tackling the Hartenbos river mouth area where a lot of waste ends up. Esther is asking for locals to also get involved. "Up to 40% of littered plastic ends up in our ocean", says Esther.
"If everyone can spend just 10 minutes cleaning their local beach this weekend, that's a lot of waste that won't end up in our ocean, putting our marine life at risk when they either get entangled in it or ingest it. Bear in mind, what ends up in the stomach of a fish can also end up on your dinner plate and plastic is made of toxins."
To get involved, just head down to your local beach with a refuse bag, or better yet, reuse some of your plastic shopping bags, and spend 10 minutes or more filling them with the waste you find. Take photos of your efforts and upload them to facebook, Instagram and twitter with the hashtag #HearttheOceansMosselBay.
The Mossel Bay Advertiser will be publishing the best photos on their website and in one of their next editions. Keep Fin Alive will also share some of the photos to their www.facebook.com/KeepFinAlive page. Please remember to dispose of the collected trash in the appropriate waste collection areas of the beaches.
Jacobs Overbeeke and Enrico Gennari, Director of Research for Oceans Research, are currently looking into ways to tackle the problem of plastic pollution around Mossel Bay.
- Plastic effects over 600 species of marine animals and South African seabirds are among the worst affected in the world. Plastic breaks down into tiny particles, which are easily ingested by fish and other marine life
- Approximately 5.25 trillion plastic particles (269,000 tons) have ended up in the oceans
- Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times
- More than one million plastic bags are used every minute
- It takes up to 1 000 years for plastic to degrade.
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