A brilliant group of Grade 5 students from Brighton Beach Primary School cleaned up! Well done to the team of Waste Warriors who removed a massive 27kg from Brighton Beach, in front of the iconic beach huts.

Among the rubbish were lots of plastic items including 115 bottle tops and 63 straws. There was so much soft plastic and small pieces of hard plastic we didn't have time to count them!

In a space of 35 minutes, 20 students collected 20kg of rubbish on their term 3 clean. A full audit was conducted and these rated as the 'high scoring' items: 245 soft small plastic pieces, 200 microplastics, 131 cigarette butts and 96 soft large plastic pieces.  Thanks to a wonderful team for helping clean Elm Road and Gardiners Creek, Glen Iris.  Look forward to your help again next term!

Special thanks to Julie who coordinated for another group of students from Taiwan to spend time helping with a group clean, this time a LoveOurStreet clean.  (Previous clean was a beach clean in February.)

Fixty six students and 6 staff collected 40.1KG of litter in only about 30 minutes.  The group met at the corner of Whiteman St & Cecil St in South Melbourne and walked along the footpaths on both sides picking up littered items, returning to the start after making a loop along City Rd. Awesome effort! 

Again THANK YOU for helping in our local community; reminding us that we are all part of the same world community!

A sunny morning greeted 23 students from APC, grade 8, for an indoor presentation on BeachPatrol, LoveOurStreet and plastics in our oceans and waterways.  This was followed by a beach clean and audit.  In total, 18 students collected/counted 1076 pieces of litter from the beaches between the South Melbourne Life Saving Club and the Port Melbourne Yacht Club.  The students learned how to use the LitterStopper app to record their data and learned of the importance of recording data.  All in all a great session with a great group of students!  Thank you APC, grade 8!

The area around Glen Iris Wetlands seemed clean yet sixteen Sacre Coeur Year 9 students collected 8 kg of rubbish from the banks beside Gardiners Creek, the trail and beside the ponds. Litter included dog toys, balls, plastic bags and other soft plastics such as bubble wrap, lolly wrappers, take-away food waste, hazard barrier tape, spray paint and drink cans, cigarette butts, polystyrene chunks and beads.

Also, six dumped bags of rubbish were removed from a water channel and reported via the Snap Send Solve app to Stonnington Council. A dumped shopping trolley was reported to Woolworths.

Students remarked on the plastic that still "festoons" the trees overhanging the creek: likely remnants from the floods in October 2022!

Thanks to Sacre Coeur for a great effort in a short period of time. The waterbirds of the wetlands and other creatures will be safer now.

Fifteen Westall Secondary College students and 2 teachers, attended Mordialloc Beach today.  We collected and discussed many forms plastic from nurdles to bottles and cigarette butts. A full audit was conducted during an hour clean.  Stats: total number of items counted/collected = 644 including 200 nurdles, 183 cigarette butts, 100 soft small plastic pieces and 41 bottle tops.  Great effort and a big thank you!! 

The grade 4 classes from Port Melb Primary did a fantastic job cleaning New Beach in Port Melbourne for about 30 minutes today!  They collected 3 bags of rubbish (approximatley 9kg) which mainly consisted of small fragments of hard plastic.  They know how important it is to remove these so our seabirds don't ingest them.  Big thanks to these students, their teachers, parents and BeachPatrol volunteers for participating in this worthwhile activity.  

What a pleasure to have a group of 65 international high school students from Taiwan come along to clean up St Kilda beach on February 1st!

Whilst Council had mechanically cleaned early in the morning, the machines miss a lot of the small plastic fragments. These are dangerous if birds, fish or other animals ingest them, so it was great that students removed 5 kg of little pieces. Our 🐧🐧🐧 and 🦈🦈🦈 will be safer now.

Catch of the day was a buoy, weighing 1.5 kg. Students were amused to find a pair of undies too. 

The clean up gave students a little insight into the culture of volunteering we encourage in Australia. 

Thank you to SAIC consultant Julie for reaching out to us. 

In wet and windy conditions on Wednesday 29 and Thursday 30 November, two groups of Year 8 students helped to clean up St Kilda Beach. 

The weather prevented a detailed audit of litter categories, so students counted food wrappers. They reported a staggering 900 wrappers. Imagine just how many there are on bay beaches, day after day, year after year! 

In all, these students removed 27 kg of rubbish that included lots of soft plastic fragments, microplastics, a measuring tape reel, a dummy, vape canisters, cigarette butts and a length of shipping rope. 

Awesome effort! Well done Melbourne Grammar.

What a great class from Emerald Secondary College helping with a beach clean up at Sandringham today! These Year 9 and 10 students are an Environmental Science class. On a cool, windy day (less than ideal beach weather), they got straight down to business collecting rubbish from the vegetation and along the beach.

They were very focussed on the task, logging their collections on the Litter Stopper app so the data could go straight into the database, that will then directly upload into the Victorian Government Litter Watch database. They recorded hundreds of plastic items. The main litter types were small soft plastics (104), large and small hard plastics (90 each), lolly wrappers (84) and polystryrene (37). The class even did a further cleanup of the dog beach after their lunch. Bonus! A couple of items to note: a glow stick (commonly used by fishers to attract fish at night), polytwine fragments (did these come from boats?), a plastic ball smaller than ping-pong (the remains of a Christmas decoration?), tile spacers, soy sauce fish lids and other sauce bubbles.

Though the collection was just 5 kg by weight, the large number of pieces collected offers important protect for the marine life whose habitat is just offshore: seabirds, fish and dolphins will not ingest these pieces all now safely binned. Students found a sleeping bag too but were thoughtful enough to leave it, thinking it may belong to a rough sleeper.

Well done Emerald Secondary College. Thank you all.