by Garry Sullivan
General Manager, Wildlife Habitat

A crew from the Wildlife Habitat (inlcuding myself) spent last weekend out and about assisting and supporting a clean up at Cooya Beach just north of Port Douglas.

The Wildlife Habitat and Tangaroa Blue Ocean Care Society joined forces to hold the beach clean up on Saturday 11 June and host a Ocean Awareness Day on Sunday 12 June  at the Habitat.

This was a huge success as all the volunteers collected 112.5kg (2051 individual pieces) of rubbish along a 1.2km stretch of beach.

The saddest thing was most of the rubbish was either beer cans or beer bottles, items  that users could easily take back off the beach and put into bins.

On the up-side, Cooya Beach's overall cleanliness is a credit to the local community whom put plenty of there own time and effort into regularly collecting other people’s rubbish from the beach.

The Education day went down well with Heidi from Tangaroa giving a talk on Ocean Debris, and Matt from the Habitat's Wildlife department talking about the dangers to animals via human waste and rubbish.

One of the main things that blew me away was the fact our own Government's Department of Meteorology sends four disposable foam weather balloons up in the sky every day. After a few hours they just fall back into the ocean or onto land and break up, washing up on beaches, coral islands and I am sure end up in the stomach of some animals.

This practice can’t be good for the environment, no matter how important it is for us to know what way the wind is blowing.

Just imagine if we all picked up one piece of rubbish a day how clean our amazing country would be, and how many animals, birds and sea creatures would not have our waste in their stomaches.

Make a difference today and pick up someone else's rubbish - even more importantly, put yours in the bin.