"Not possible, too much rubbish" - "How are you going to do that?" - "You're crazy"
Those were the responses we got when we said we were going to clean up the whole of Chilli Beach – a 7km remote marine debris hotspot just north of Lockhart River on the east coast of Cape York.
This was always going to be one big mission, but we were convinced that it was possible and so the organising started.
Over five days at the end of July more than 60 volunteers assisted in the removal of 5.52 tonnes of marine debris from Chilli Beach. This filled over 513 bags, with many of the items way too large to fit into bags including a refrigerator, mountains of rope and even gas cylinders.
The southern end of the beach gets affected by an eddie that carries marine debris in and around the southern headland causing them to accumulate. This was where much of the effort was focused, sometimes a full day only covered 800m of beach. This section of the beach has never been cleaned, and so volunteers were removing debris that has been piling up for decades!
More than 90% of the debris collected was made up of plastics – drink bottles, bleach bottles, oil containers, fishing crates, kilometres of ropes and nets, broken bits of remnant from hard and soft plastics, and even plastic resin pellets – the raw form of plastic that is used to make plastic products! Labels on the debris showed that this stuff has travelled from far and wide – Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, China, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines as well as domestic rubbish from Australia.
Also found were thousands of pieces of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's notorious polystyrene foam weather balloons. Proving yet again what goes up, must come down – and it seems a lot of them come down here!
And the final statistics of the event – 4696 thongs – and for those of you interested – we found both left and right thongs!
Friday morning saw the annual community clean up event with students from Lockhart River State School, Lockhart River Shire Council, local volunteers, tourists and campers joining the clean up effort focusing on the northern side of the beach. They were rewarded with a BBQ and snacks sponsored by Out of Blue Café and Freddie Clarence Moses Retail Store.
At the end, it seems like we were going to have a mountain load of debris and this would have triple filled the local Portland Roads landfill, which would have eventually just burnt. To prevent this, volunteers separated all the plastics as they picked it up. Cook Shire sent up a baler and operators to the event and all this plastic was squashed into 1 cubic metre bales – a total of 9 were created – diverting tonnes of plastic from the landfill. The plastic bales are now on their way down to Brisbane where the new Replas facility would give this mixed, baled plastics new life by making them into benches, poles and bollards.
At the end of the event the amounts were staggering, the volunteers exhausted, but Chilli Beach has never looked better, and all partners are already talking about next year!
This project was made possible by the committed support of all partners. A huge thank you goes to the Conservation Volunteers Australia team, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers, Cook Shire, Caring for Our Country and all the volunteers and supporters!