COSTAL CLEANING

Did you ever hear about a competition on waste collection? Because this is a thing now! In November 2023 Japan will launch the first World Cup of collecting trash. In teams of three, people from all over the world have to collect, sort and recycle as much waste as possible within a time limit of one hour. This is a good way to raise awareness of the pollution-problem, but how did it come so far?

Yes, it’s not the easiest to collect trash from the center of the ocean far away from every coastline. But that’s why it’s even more important to start at the beaches. Everybody knows these pictures of polluted beaches in Southeast-Asia where you walk on a carpet of fishing nets, bottles and plastic bags. But did you ever hear about beach cleaning in Iceland?

There are 12 million tons of trash finding their way into the ocean every year. That’s one truck load per minute. The countries which contribute the most trash are China, Indonesia and Philippine. It’s not only unaesthetic to look at, the biggest problem is actually that animals and ecosystems are suffering from this. It is assumed that more than 100.000 marine mammals and over one million seabirds die from plastic in the ocean every year. So what can we do about it?

A country known as one of the cleanest countries of the world. Why is it necessary to clean up beaches in a country that is most advanced in terms of preventing climate change? That’s a common thought we shared before we became volunteers at Worldwide Friends in Iceland. But even the first time we went to the beach to clean it up we were shocked. On three days in 2023 we collected trash for just two hours a day. In the end we had the huge amount of 435.7 kg at a distance of 1.32 km.

Iceland is very famous for its beautiful nature. So we thought there was much less rubbish in the nature. But this is not the case. I guess the pollution increases in proportion to the damage. So if someone creates pollution, it means that it can cause two or three problems elsewhere. We live on the same planet and we share the ocean, the atmosphere and the land. In any case, we have to keep our earth clean together. Some associations in Iceland have organized multiple clean-ups with the help of volunteers from all over the world and locals. However, garbage is not always trash, some of them are treasure like driftwood can be reuse and it’s a super valuable resource. In WorldwideFriends we already reuse a lot of trash we found on the renovation of the camps. We also work on a creative way to reuse the trash like create bags with fishing nets.

The main aim of WF is to clean the most of the Icelandic coastline and collect data in order to sensibilise and raise awareness. WF started the project of cleaning in 2006, since then it has been a big part of the organisation. At the moment we collect everything on the costal cleaning: plastics, metals, fishing nets, clothes, paper, rubber, electronic waste, wood, glass and ceramics.

And no matter how small the pieces of trash are, every tiny one we collect will probably save the life of an animal.

And of course we want to clean our oceans to protect the nature!

Because if we don’t change anything, in 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean…

As you see, this is a bigger problem than we thought and if more people take action, more it can be changed.

By Saori, Hannah, Janne