19th International Coastal cleanup

I went for the coastal cleanup last saturday. It was quite an eye-opening experience for me. :) We were assigned to Chek Jawa to do the coastal cleanup. Woke up at 5.45am and took a train to Eunos station, then a bus to the jetty and then took a ride in a boat pulau ubin and then a van directly to the area where our school was assigned to do the coastal cleanup. Armed with gloves, trashbags and cutters, we cleaned up the length of beach. There was seriously a lot of rubbish and the variety of rubbish found was quite shocking. There were plastic bags, fishing nets, ropes, those big plastic drums, tyres etc. and things like an intact wooden folding chair! There was a list we had to mark against, using the statistical method where you put 4 horizontal lines and the 5th vertical line across for each item we picked and threw into the trash bag. Picking rubbish may seem easy but there were some things like having to bend low to untangle ropes entangled on the mangrove branches and picking up sacks filled with sand that required a lot of strength and effort. We only cleaned up for an hour or so because of the incoming tide but we collected quite a lot of things... filling 23 trash bags! I still find it quite unbelievable that people can throw things like a chair into the sea! Why do these people treat the sea like a rubbish bin. We cleared rubbish on only a 50m stretch of beach on Chek Jawa and already found so much rubbish... imagine the amount of rubbish dumped around the entire island! Through this coastal cleanup, I've seen the extent of human damage done to the environment of non-biodegradable waste. You should have seen the "decorations" of rubbish and ropes etc. on the mangrove branches... Yup, so I realised that it is very important to dispose of waste appropriately and how important it is to look after the environment. 

Here are the statistics of our cleanup.