BCG’S 2023 BEACH CLEAN-UP

Feature And Photography Ally Landes

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG in the Middle East) did their regular annual beach clean-up with us on the 3rd of February as part of our Cleanup Arabia campaign, and their Community Service Day. The BCG team collected an impressive 30kg of rubbish in an hour and 15 minutes with 12 volunteers concentrating on collecting all the smaller items found on the beach grounds. The rest of the time was spent on the task of sorting out the items to count the individual materials found, and weigh the final results.

Their results have been shared to the International Coastal Cleanup’s Ocean Conservancy database, and added to EDA’s total weight collected by EDA members and partners through EDA’s Cleanup Arabia campaign since 1995. That figure now stands at 56,519.15kg.

We have seen a noticeable change over the years where we now collect much smaller and broken down items which beach visitors leave behind, and street cleaners ignore.

2kg of that rubbish was 3,681 cigarette butts!!! Those have been handed over to Goumbook to their ‘Save the Butts – Waste to Value’ which is the first sustainability initiative run in the UAE that adopts a Circular Economy approach to environmental pollution, by recycling cigarette butts into valuable manufacturing material.

According to The World Health Organisation (WHO) and its published report – Tobacco and its Environmental Impact: “Cigarette butts have consistently comprised 30-40% of all items picked up in annual international coastal and urban clean-ups since the 1980s”.

For more information on ‘Save the Butts’, go to: www.goumbook.com/save-the-butts