We had another successful beach clean-up yesterday morning with the @dpworlduae team! They powered on to clean-up our marine environment at the public beach at La Mer which is always in desperate need of TLC. We had some help from a few beach goers and neighbourhood residents who visited the beach for their morning exercise, filling up a couple of bags of rubbish to add to the pile before leaving the beach. Thank you guys!
This beach shamefully continues to be abused by countless cigarette butts, beverage glass and plastic bottles, beverage cans, takeaway food containers, sachets, cups and plates (foam, paper and plastic), plastic cutlery, plastic and metal bottle caps, plastic bags of all kinds, paper takeaway bags, cigarette cartons, e-cigarettes, PPE gloves…and these are just a few of the items we remove each time. This particular morning was the worst we have seen it in a very long time, and we collected a total of 53.4kg! Which is 4-6 times more if you follow the clean-ups we do at this location.
0.9kg of that was 2,458 cigarette butts alone. All our cigarette butts are separated from the rest of the waste and sent to @goumbook towards their Save the Butts – Waste to Value campaign to recycle them into a sustainable alternative to plywood.
DID YOU KNOW?
📍Cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, a man-made plastic material, and they contain hundreds of toxic chemicals.
📍The chemicals released can remain in the environment for many more years beyond the life of the cigarette butt itself.
📍One cigarette butt alone, contaminates 500 litres of water
📍Cigarette butts are actually the most abundant form of plastic waste in the world, with about 4.5 trillion individual butts polluting our global environment!
