On Tuesday, 22nd of October 2019, FSL India’s HBP Staff and Volunteers, Uppunda Panchayat, Rani Bale Fishermen Co-operative Society and Coastal Security Guard unit jointly organised a beach clean-up at Uppunda, Madikal beach. Some of the local fishermen and youth also joined us to help clean up the beach. The beach area where we collected the washed up trash was 100 metres long.

The first step included collecting all items that were larger than 2.5 cm and putting them into bags. We sifted through the water and the sand right up to the beginning of the road. Sometimes, it was hard to get the items in one piece because they had already started composting, or were buried deep down in the sand. Afterwards, we brought all the bags to a central point, where some started to sort the trash, while others continued collecting.

Later, everyone joined together in order to separate the trash into different categories, e.g. plastics, glass, pharmacy bottles, packages, toiletries, textiles or fishing nets. The items of each category were counted, to get some information about the origin of most trash. Then, we successfully finished our work and handed the trash to Uppunda Panchayat for recycling.

We spent our valuable work time for this little bit of achievement and we had lots of fun together, in total.