Source: Radio New Zealand
More than 100 people have mucked in to help clean up rubbish from Wellington’s waterfront today.
Wellington Museum’s annual Great Big Waterfront Clean Up is in its eighth year.
On average each year, the clean up usually collected around 1500 litres of rubbish.
Organiser Naiomi Murgatroyd expected this year’s total would be about the same.
In the past they’ve uncovered some interesting finds.
“We get a lot of road cones,” she said. “We’ve actually pulled Lime scooters out of the sea.”
Acrylic nails were another common find, and once she said they found a doll’s head.
Murgatroyd said Wellington was the only capital city in the world to be home to little blue penguins, some of which nest along the waterfront.
“They make their homes right in all those rocks and crevices along the waterfront here. So any time there’s any rubbish or debris or anything like that, you know, that’s something that could harm them if they eat it.”
Cecilia Tuiomanufili liked to take an active part in looking after the environment. She brought her granddaughter Layla down to the clean up to help out.
She said what she hoped to get out of the clean up was removing all the rubbish the birds could eat and to teach her granddaughter about looking after the environment.
“If we can’t live well in our environment and take care of it, how are our children supposed to know how to do that?,” she said.
“We should be showing our children this is how we do it, this is how we keep our environment clean.”
Anna Brewster is here from England on a working visa.
“I’m a guest in this country and it’s beautiful and I’ve learned a lot about the ecology and the nature and I want to help in some way and I saw the poster and thought it would be a good thing to do.”
She said most of the rubbish she picked up was plastic or aluminium, but she did make a few other finds.
“I found some bucket hats, a lot of bottles of beer, lots of condoms,” she said.
She said she also came across a lot of cigarette butts.
“Which is a shame because I feel like that’s the kind of thing people, they don’t really see it as littering, because they’ll like have a cigarette and then just throw it away because it’s kind of the done thing.”
Maggie Drawz, Cole Kasbarian and Samuel Goldsmith were visiting from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.
Through their school they’re partnering with local organisations to help solve social science problems and get involved in communities around the world.
They got involved in the clean up through Zelandia who is a sponsor of their project here.
“They asked us if we would like to join, and we were like, absolutely. So we’ve been here cleaning up, and we’ve enjoyed every second of it,” said Kasbarian.
Plastic, food and broken glass were among the items they cleaned up.
The group has also got some pretty nice things to say about Wellington’s Waterfront compared to back home.
“Everything is so nice around here,” said Goldsmith. “It’s much cleaner.
“People seem a lot more conscious of caring for their environment and doing what they can individually compared to back home, which is really great to see,” said Drawz.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
