I participated for the first time in the monthly coastal cleanup activity set by Tainan’s voluntary group of marine debris monitoring. The idea of collecting liter on the beach and recording the data about the number and kind of garbage found there comes originally from the USA but has spread to other countries, like Taiwan.

The purpose of this action is to try to determine the source of the different debris and to make the population conscious of the amount of pollution they cause during their daily life without even noticing it. By doing so, the volunteer workers hope to be able to eventually figure out a solution for reducing and preventing the contamination of the environment with liter produced by humans. In that way they were able to illustrate the huge amount of plastic bags and beverage cups used by the Taiwanese population, for those items are found the most both in frequency and number. Those results can help not only to voice a direct appeal to the people to mind their usage of plastic items, but also to initiate a governmental engagement in the environmental issue and to force them to change the situation by setting up a regulation or other agendas.

This action inspired for example the government’s establishment of the rule to give a discount on the price in favour of bringing one’s own reusable cup or bottle to be filled at one of the many tea and other beverage shops. This time’s cleanup took place on a beach near an elementary school. After gathering the volunteers a short introduction of the procedure to the new helpers was announced (this included the remind not to collect natural items like seaweed or straw for that actually doesn’t count as garbage, at least not on the beach, although most people wouldn’t want to have it in their homes…). Having distributed the garbage bags for filling and gloves for protecting your hands both from dirt and sharp edges or glass splinters the group could start the actual “cleaning” of the beach. This action didn’t take so long as one might have expected- not that there was not enough liter to collect. But firstly we were a rather large group of volunteers and secondly we limited our area of operation to a more or less small space, otherwise we could not have made it! For it is nearly impossible to clean a whole beach in one day, because there is too much waste lying around everywhere. Furthermore it is not very comfortable to spend a long period of time in the blazing sunlight, so we finished our work after approximately one hour. In the following we had to separate and count the different items of debris, at which one has to mention that it is not easy to find a suitable system of categorizing the liter, for there are often a lot of tiny scrapes of plastic that can’t be assigned to a specific item. And sometimes you simply don’t now how to name the thing you found… After pouring out the whole amount of collected garbage we recorded the amount of what we could clearly distinguish as a certain object, the evaluation you can look up on the group's website:https://beach.tncomu.tw/modules/tadnews/index.php?nsn=293 

 Even though it may at first sight appear a fruitless effort to some people, I will certainly participate in the clean-up again! But next time I should wear long pants, for you are rather in acute danger of getting injured by pointed debris!

link to https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6B4 ... DSU/s640/1321523272_0.jpg