Coral Sea Marina Resort makes steps to clean up Australia

With hundreds of people across Australia every year participating in the annual Clean Up Australia Day events, the team at Coral Sea Marina Resort decided this year was their turn to make the pledge and commit to making a difference.

In partnership with Tangaroa Blue Foundation and the Rotary Club of Airlie Beach, Coral Sea Marina Resort put the call out to the Whitsunday community on Sunday 6^th March to come and help clean up. Volunteers came out in heatwave conditions to do their bit and collect litter on land and at sea.

Kate Purdie, CEO at Coral Sea Marina, explained, “The first Sunday in March is generally a scorcher in the tropics – and that was especially true this year – so we were thrilled to have a dedicated group of volunteers brave the heat and help us do our part by joining in Coral Sea Marina Resort’s Clean Up Australia Day event in partnership with Tangaroa Blue Foundation and the Rotary Club of Airlie Beach.”

The Rotary Club of Airlie Beach took tenders out from the marina and cleaned up areas only accessible by boat, whilst enthusiastic children and their families walked Airlie Beach’s scenic boardwalk collecting litter and debris along the way.

Purdie continued, “After dedicated campaigns to reduce the use of plastic straws and plastic bags it was great to see fewer of them this year, but they have been replaced with disposable masks and shopping receipts among other items – a compelling reminder that the real issue is single use anything, not just plastics.”

Collection bags were provided by Tangaroa Blue as part of their ReefClean program, with all the litter collected being sorted, monitored and weighed with the data then being inputted into the Australian Marine Debris Initiative database for further analysis. In total, 131kg of litter was collected, with the main items collected being plastic food packaging and hard and soft plastic fragments.

Heidi Tait, CEO at Tangaroa Blue Foundation, commented, "Clean Up Australia Day is a wonderful opportunity for the community to partner up for the benefit of our environment. Every piece of rubbish removed also removes the threat it poses to our wildlife and every piece of data collected provides the evidence needed to push for change. We look forward to doing it all again in October for the ReefClean Great Barrier Reef Clean-up event."

With source reduction being a strong focus of Coral Sea Marina’s environmental policy, another initiative they are currently working on with the Tangaroa Blue Foundation is the ReefClean ‘Ditch the Flick’ campaign. This campaign is designed to drive behavioural changes among smokers on the Great Barrier Reef, reducing cigarette butt litter and offering a better way of disposing of them.

As part of the ReefClean program, the team from Tangaroa Blue Foundation will monitor the cigarette butt hotspots with the aim of the project being to see significant changes in the number of butts collected over time.

Tait continued, "Our ReefClean program provides a great opportunity to collaborate with business partners across the Great Barrier Reef. The Coral Sea Marina has taken the lead, becoming the first marina to start implementing the ReefClean Ditch the Flick program which aims to reduce cigarette butt litter around the marina grounds.”

All marina guests, visitors and locals are encouraged to support the campaign by disposing of cigarette butts in the bin provided and ‘ditching the flick’. A social and digital campaign will support the program and be rolled out by the marina to generate awareness over the coming months.

The Clean Up Australia day event was coordinated through Coral Sea Marina’s educational event platform, the Coral Sea Academy. The Coral Sea Academy provides a series of immersive and engaging events for people to consciously connect with boating, the environment and themselves.

For more information, visit Coral Sea Marina.

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