Coastal clean-up this Saturday

8,000 volunteers expected to take part

Did you know that only 2% of the waste collected from beaches in the State is fish waste and 55% is plastics? If you want to make a difference, you can join volunteers from various schools, colleges, NGOs and corporates, who will take part in a massive effort to prevent trash from entering the oceans on Saturday morning.

Organised by Indian Maritime Foundation (IMF), Chennai India (South), in partnership with Ocean Conservancy, USA, the effort will see over 8,000 persons cleaning up 350 km of the Indian coastline.

Addressing the media on Tuesday, S. Krishnamurthi, vice-president, IMF, Chennai, explained that their aim was to create awareness about the importance of keeping our beaches and oceans clean.

“We will be covering beaches in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa and Port Blair. The idea is to collect solid trash before it enters the marine and aquatic bio-system and causes irreparable environmental damage,” he said. During last year’s clean up campaign, 9,40,170 plastic beverage bottles, 40 toilets, 5,55,007 plastic straws and 16,85,432 food wrappers were found on the beaches.

The event will be inaugurated by Mylapore MLA R. Nataraj in the presence of actor-director Suhasini Mani Ratnam at 7 a.m. and will go on for three hours. As part of the clean-up, portions of the Adyar and Cooum rivers, Chembarambakkam lake, Maduranthakam lake and Pulicat lake too will be cleaned.

Increasing coverage

Former vice-president of IMF, Admiral Srinivasan said that India came 9th in merit for the international coastal clean-up programme, largely due to the ever increasing coverage along the south Indian coast under this programme.

He hoped that more youth would get into a culture of ensuring clean coasts and waterbodies at all times, totally eliminating the use of plastic bags and their ingress into water bodies.

For this, a credible system of recycling of coastal trash into wealth at a local level should be put in place, he said.