Hundreds of volunteers are rolling up their sleeves again these weeks on the beaches along the North Sea. During the Beach Clean Up Tour, the coast is cleaned of all litter. Today the group arrived in Petten and from there they searched for dirt seven kilometers along the beach, all the way to Callantsoog.
It is already the ninth edition of the Boskalis Beach Clean Up tour of the De Noordzee foundation and every year it turns out that this major cleaning is desperately needed. The garbage bags of the volunteers are already filled with a lot of waste after a few hundred meters. “We have already cleaned up quite a lot of waste,” says Tako Popma of the De Noordzee foundation.
And that is possible thanks to the forty volunteers – young and old – who scour the beaches for waste on this hot day. “I have a stick from a kite, a lot of string, a lollipop paper and some plastic that is unrecognizable,” says a volunteer when she looks in her box. Cas, the youngest volunteer of today, already has quite a bit in his garbage bag. “Styrofoam, a plastic bag and a mouth cap”, he shows.
Popma has participated in the annual clean-up campaign six times before, so she knows better than anyone how beachgoers deal with their rubbish. After the daily weighings, a lot of waste is still left behind on the beach. After four clean-up campaigns in the Noordkop, no less than 632.5 kilos of waste and 3012 cigarette butts have been collected.
butts
According to the foundation, the cigarette butts that are always found in the sand are a major permanent problem, because a butt consists of 90 percent plastic. “Last year we collected 60,000 butts,” says Popma.
That is why a lot of attention is paid during the tour to mapping all those butts that are left behind on the beach. This year they will be collected and counted separately.
But the foundation wants more: “We have started a campaign and a petition to call on coastal municipalities and beach managers to commit themselves to cigarette-free beaches,” explains Popma.