Marine Debris: The Scourge of Petone Beach Tourism

One of the significant issues affecting marine beaches is excessive amounts of marine debris. The marine debris is a collection of human-made waste that exist in the marine environment such as oceans and seas. Marine wastes are also known as marine litter, meaning that it is humans who intentionally dispose of some of the litter into the marine environment. Some of the most common materials include metal, plastics, glass, cloth, wood, and rubber.

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Tourism in Petone beach provides to the community and New Zealand with a lot of returns, including revenue. However, the community around Petone beach don't have the necessary equipment to deal with the debris that gets deposited into the water and the beach. Also, limited funding means that few people can step up to clean the beach when the marine debris washes up on the shore. The dirty beach usually translates to limited traffic by tourists and as a result, reduces the revenue flow into the community.

It is safe to say that the community around Petone beach is not entirely to blame. The people of New Zealand believe in the Maori principles of nature which lies between hapu and iwi. These principles call for personal responsibility to care for nature and appreciate nature (Miller, Kahungunu & Tuwharetoa, 2019). Some of the trash that washes up on the beach originates from other locations within the country or even the tourists themselves who litter around the beach. However, one of the issues that accelerates the presence of marine debris around Petone beach can be attributed to the lax authorities and weak policies that safeguard the beach from excessive littering.

To ensure success in rehabilitating the beach, various actions need to be undertaken. One of the actions is to ensure that the beach is free from marine debris by installing recycling bins at every point on the beach. Further, the public needs to be educated on the importance of disposing of litter in recycling bins rather than disposing the trash on the beach.

Action Plan

An article by Independent Magazine shows that tones of plastic end up in the sea threatening marine life (Henderson, 2017). According to the article, plastics take 500 to 1000 years to decompose (Henderson, 2017). Most of the plastics sit on landfills and find their ways into the rivers and finally into the oceans, which contributes to the significant part of pollution (Henderson, 2017). Countries like the Philippines face the worst crisis coming from marine pollution whereby the plastics have wiped out 60% of marine life challenging the livelihoods of marine fishers in the country (Roth & Greenwood-Nguyen, 2019).

Some of the steps taken by other countries such as France has been to ban plastics altogether (France 24, 2019). However, this solution does not solve the problem of existing pollution in the ocean. One of the proposed ideas is to sensitize the public to practice sustainable living by littering less and contributing towards cleaning up of the beach by being responsible.

Methodology

Goal 1

Mobilize teams to collect garbage within the Petone Beach

Objectives.

1. Develop a team of 5-10 members to assist in the collection of garbage around the beach.

2. Isolate materials based on their recycle properties. All metals will be separated from the plastics and allocated their respective recycle agent.

The garbage collection will ensure that the beach is free from any hazardous materials. Despite the cleanup process, there will still be cases of garbage washing up on the beach or even littering from the tourists. Therefore, a comprehensive action plan is a requirement to ensure that there are means to deal with the collection of garbage at the beach over time.

Goal 2

Enhance the garbage collections and recycling capabilities within the beach.

Objectives.

1. Identify areas around the beach where garbage is likely to collect.

2. Set up recycling bins within the identified areas. Also, the recycling bins will have to be set up in areas whereby tourists congregate like food stalls and access points to the beach.

The implementation of recycling bins will serve the purpose of collecting trash that would otherwise have been thrown into the ocean and collected by the tide. Easy access to recycling bins will ensure that beachgoers utilize the facilities and maintain social responsibility. However, there are cases whereby the use of these facilities may be ignored.

Goal 3

Sensitize the public on the importance of disposing of garbage appropriately using advertising materials such as billboards and signs.

Objectives.

Educate the public on the importance of disposing of the trash in recycling bins using pictorial signboards. Despite the implementation of some of the recycling spots, there may be instances whereby the recycling bins remain neglected. The use of this strategy will ensure that there are appropriate recycling measures put in place to the public.

To measure the effectiveness of the action plan; the research will employ the use of qualitative measures of assessing the progress. Observation will be used to assess the success of the project and determine whether the recycling bins were used efficiently in tackling pollution at the beach. Finally, surveys will be employed to assess whether the recycling bins are useful to the people within the beach and whether people use them often. However, it is expected that there will be biased data from the survey as data from the respondents may be fictitious and provide inaccuracies to the overall audit.

Reflection

The project incorporated all the ideas from the team. The brainstorming process involved taking ideas from others and assessing the viability of the ideas. After approval, the collection process started well. However, during garbage collection, individuals suffered fatigue from the heat. The trash collection process continued on day two, with more ground coverage to assist in the trash collection process. The day three trash collection process received a significant boost from the community through the use of #TrashTag challenge, which was a trash collection challenge that had gone viral on the internet. Various people assisted with the process, and by the end of the day, all the trash had been collected.

Part of my weakness was the failure to identify some of the challenges that the team would face in the process of collecting trash. However, after considering the challenges such as excessive heat, we decided to come up with solutions such as hour breaks in between tasks to ensure that team members recover. Some of the strengths included mobilizing the public using the #TrashTag challenge to assist with the trash collection process. The remaining task of installing recycling bins and signboards remained with the team to which we completed effectively in a day.

The data collected from the field proved that the project was effective as there was few trash along the beach. However, it should not be assumed that the use of recycling bins will solve the existing issues as some of the responsibility rests with individuals using the beach. The project has the potential to encourage others in the future to find more sustainable actions towards eradicating marine trash and create accountability from the public.

References

France 24. (2019). Plastic shopping bags in France are now history. Retrieved from https://www.france24.com/en/20160701-france-bans-plastic-bags-distributed-stores

Henderson, E. (2017). How not recycling plastic is damaging our oceans. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/why-recycle-plastic-rubbish-oceans-8-million-tonnes-pollution-microplastics-a7541476.html

Miller, D., Kahungunu, N., & Tuwharetoa, N. (2019). Western and Maori Values for Sustainable Development. Retrieved from http://www.firstfound.org/david%20miller.htm

Roth, R., & Greenwood-Nguyen, A. (2019). Philippines may be a big-time ocean polluter, but it's not entirely at fault. Retrieved from http://www.interaksyon.com/opinion/2019/03/18/145881/philippines-ocean-pollution-plastic-waste-western-world-blame/