tomandbuntytrails

The grim reality of many beaches around the world is that they are littered with plastic, waste oil and used or discarded fishing gear. As you all know fishing gear can get caught up in the mouths and fins of turtles, whales and sharks – with horrific consequences. Plastic can be ingested by fish and other sea creatures causing hormonal changes, illness and death. We teamed up with the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Conservation Fund to assist with their beach clean up at Clare Valley.

The community here live right on the beach and many of them fish for a living or just to provide for their families. The beach was surprisingly bad, most of the trash was left by locals near the beach or washed down the river from the rest of the village which continues up the valley. The local council had done nothing to provide bins or to encourage locals to keep the beach clean either. Some of the trash was heavy duty too – boat engines, corrugated roofing panel, tyres, paint tins, fishing nets. It was really depressing at times. I hope that the locals will motivate one another to keep the beach clean our the efforts of the army of volunteers who cleaned it up – we managed to fill a huge skip with waste in a few hours!

I will take another look soon to see how the community is dealing with rubbish and se if there is any improvement. As an outsider I tend to just get stuck in with the hands on work and not lecture locals on how they can improve things, I leave that up to local volunteers!