No matter where you walk, you’ve probably seen them: little stinky discarded dog poo bags. Sometimes they’re along sidewalks. They’re also in the woods or even tied from tree branches like Christmas ornaments. As no one really wants Mother Nature decorated with these smelly pouches of poo, why do people discard their pet droppings? After all, they went to the trouble of bagging it, why not actually haul it away?
Maybe the offender dropped off the bag with every intention of picking it up on their way back from the walk. But then they went a different way home. Or got distracted and totally forgot.
Maybe the dog owner had no plans on carrying a reeking sack with them on their lovely stroll at all. They figured bagging it was enough of an effort. Someone else can pick it up.
Or maybe bagging and tossing—particularly on a trail—is someone’s mistaken belief that biodegradable bags will quickly break down. Biodegradable bags can be made out of corn or petroleum and contain microorganisms to help break down the bag. But “biodegradable” is merely a marketing term with no standard or legal definition.
A study published in 2019 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that several bags that were marketed as "biodegradable" survived in the open air, buried in soil, and submerged in seawater for three years or more. Compostable bags, on the other hand, are made of plant starch. They contain no plastics and are generally more expensive. In the study, the compostable bag dissolved in seawater in three months.
Dogs are eating diets rich in protein and added nutrients that throw the ecosystem out of whack when their poop hits the ground - their poo must be picked up.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #dog #plastic

Please take your rubbish with you. It can trap, entangle, hurt and poison animals.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #litter

This juvenile Pied Shag was dropped off to Wellington Zoo after being found on the ground, weak and emaciated. The team at The Nest Te Kōhanga immediately performed an endoscopy and then managed to get a vape pen out, but unfortunately the Shag died overnight.
The vet team suspect he wouldn’t have been able to eat for days before he came in and would’ve suffered from serious metal and nicotine poisoning.
Unfortunately we see animals with these sorts of problems regularly. A sad reminder to please always tidy up after yourself and make sure these lovely birds don’t mistake your rubbish for food.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic #beachcleanup #trashtag #plasticocean #trash #litter #beachcleanup #savethisplanet #bird

​Balloons are in the top three most harmful waste items to wildlife. Birds and turtles not only ingest balloons, they actively select them as food. This is because a burst balloon often resembles a jellyfish, the natural food sources of many marine species like turtles.
Ingesting balloons, and the clips and strings attached to them, can cause intestinal blockages and results in a slow painful death through starvation. Marine animals don’t have the gastrointestinal pH levels to breakdown a balloon and for turtles, it may also cause floating syndrome. Trapped gases in the gut can cause a turtle to become buoyant, unable to dive for food—making them vulnerable to boat strikes and leading to starvation and severe dehydration.
Wildlife, both terrestrial and marine, can also become entangled in balloon ribbons or strings, causing injury or death through drowning, suffocation, or an inability to feed and avoid predators.
Even if balloons are disposed of "safely" they go to landfill where it may take up to 1,000 years to decompose, leaching potentially toxic substances into the soil and water. Why are some organisations like this so stubborn in regards to using balloons as "advertising fun?
Even if these balloons are biodegradable, it's greenwash. Natural latex may be biodegradable, but after adding chemicals, plasticizers and artificial dyes, how natural could it be? It may degrade after several years, but it’s surely not “biodegradable.” Balloons are also the number 1 cause of death in sea birds such as Albatross and Mutton birds that have consumed plastic.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #balloons #balloonsblow #loveManly #litter #beachcleanup #Manlybeach

Researchers from the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Queensland set out to look at how much microplastic was in all forms of rice available to consumers. Research has found packs of instant rice contain up to 13 milligrams of microplastics, highlighting the need for more to be done to limit plastic content in food. Lead author Jake O’Brien said they found regular uncooked rice had about three to four milligrams of microplastics for every 100 grams of rice in the samples they tested, while that jumped to 13 milligrams for instant rice.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic #rice

Pre-peeled eggs and some spinach comes at a cost - you pay for the packaging. Buy plastic free!
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic #saynotoplastic #plasticfree

If you buy plastic free, you're guaranteed snake free lettuce. This is a juvenile Pale Headed Snake (Hoplocephalus bitorquatus), capable of causing a dangerous bite found in a pre-packed lettuce bag at Aldi in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. The snake has since been taken back to Queensland and released.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plasticfree #snake #lettuce #plastic #aldi #mosman

We have been nicely asking supermarkets and producers to fix this excess packaging problem for DECADES, petitions, direct emails, customer feedback etc, many of us boycott plastic products, yet the problem GETS WORSE! How can we get shops to listen?
Jackie often goes to to Aldi. She unwraps her shopping and leaved the plastic packaging in the shop to highlight the excess single use plastic created by the food industry. The manager has spoken to her and she has explained her reasons for doing this. Jacki asked him to contact Aldi head office to request they review their policy on the use of plastic and he promised to do this.
What do you think works best?
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic

What does fresh mean to you?
Pre-cut fruit in a sealed plastic container? You pay for plastic packaging, not for freshness.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plasticfree #plastic #saynotoplastic

Balloons found at Dee Why beach a few weeks ago. Balloons do not go to heaven. They land in the ocean and choke sea turtles, kill dolphins and whales, and the ribbons entangle birds. Many times, they end up on a beach as litter. Even the ones marked "biodegradable" can hurt animals before they have a chance to break down. Animals far from the ocean, such as horses, have been hurt and killed by balloons (they eat them when they land in their hay or they get spooked and bolt). Some balloons have started fires when they got entangled in power lines.
Sky lanterns have set homes, power lines, trees, and buildings on fire. Sky lanterns can also entangle an animal even if it is marketed as "biodegradable." There are many safe alternatives to releasing litter into the air, such as planting a tree for your loved one and watching it bloom, or blowing bubbles into the air. Grief is a painful process. In our grief, we do not need to cause others grief. While there are many environmental problems facing our planet, this is a very simple one to solve.

#northernbeachescleanupcrew #balloons #balloonsblow #nature

Wherever you are in the world, please use a reusable mask as your first option but if you for whatever reason need to wear single-use masks, please CUT the strings before throwing them out.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #mask

Every year 1 billion disposable coffee cups end up in landfill sites across Australia and in NSW 300 million have the same fate, causing significant environmental impact.
.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #keepcup #coffee #litter #beachescouncil #beachcleanup

Is this your wrapper? Mars bar wrapper with the best before date 1994 found this week at Queenscliff beach.
The vast majority of debris in the ocean — about 75 percent of it — is made of plastic. It can consist of anything from plastic bottles to packaging materials, but whatever form it takes, it doesn't go away easily. While plastic may break down into smaller and smaller pieces, some as small as grains of sand, these pieces are never truly biodegradable. The plastic bits, some small enough that they're called microplastics, threaten marine life like fish, birds and turtles. Up to 95% of some populations of birds have plastic in their gut.
We can clean up beaches every day for the rest of our lives. But it's a little bit like trying to mop the floor up in your bathroom. If the bath is overflowing and both taps in the bath and the shower are all running at full speed, it's a waste of time trying to just clean up. You will need to clean up eventually but the first thing is to stem the flow. And that has to be the priority. Say no to single use plastic.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic #beachcleanup

Camille Reed is the founder of the Australasian Circular Textile Association, a not-for-profit that advocates for more sustainability in the fashion and textile sector. She says about 30 percent of all online sales are returned in Australia.
"And of that 30 percent, a further 30 percent cannot be sold". That's part of the roughly 800,000 tonnes of textile waste generated in Australia annually, according to the latest numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
When returns come in, they'll usually be manually assessed to make sure the product is in good condition, and fits the company's protocols for resale. "Maybe there's no capacity to actually have staff on the payroll to facilitate that," says Camille Reed. "There probably is a huge cost associated with holding [certain] labels and branding and remarketing, ensuring that it's all correct." If items can't be resold, they might be donated to charities, sold on to discount chains - or tossed altogether.
Associate Processor Payne says companies will ultimately be thinking about their bottom line, as well as the environmental impact. "For each particular retailer, they have to make a decision: which is the most cost effective pathway?" she says.
"And for some of them, it might be to partner with a charity or a textile recycler, to handle that waste." "Sometimes the easiest pathway, the path of least resistance, might be landfill or to overseas retail incineration as well."
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #landfill

Glitter is not only impossible to clean up, it also stays in the environment FOREVER! Choose biodegradable glitter made from cellulose instead, or make eco-confetti with a hole puncher and fallen leaves. We don't need plastic to sparkle!
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic

​People are creating more waste than ever. Bins are overflowing faster and faster, partly due to all of the packaging food comes in nowadays, and partly due to not enough collection times. That is why it’s more important than ever to deal with it efficiently.
So, what can be done to prevent this problem with bins on a wider scale?
Some of the solutions are quite simple, like getting more regular collections, or making efforts to reduce the waste you generate. As for more specialised solutions, smart solar-powered compactor bins are popular in many public areas. These can hold up to eight times as much waste as normal bins due to their compaction process, function through solar power to be eco-friendly, and have the technology to inform those collecting the waste when the bin is about to become full to prevent them overflowing!
In smaller areas, smart fill-level sensors in bins are more appropriate in terms of spacing, playing the same role in monitoring when the bin is full. A monitoring platform can also be put in place to plan out future collections ahead of time, making collections far more efficient and costs being reduced by 50%.
With new ways to use bins, overflowing bins may soon stop being a problem, hopefully bringing an end to the problems of large amounts of business and household waste as well. That being said, we’ll probably find a way to make more waste in the meantime. Will the Northern Beaches Council look at these options? Not sure, but we hope so. All these pictures were taken tonight, by Manly wharf, by the bus stop by Gilbert Park and by the main beach.
.
.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #bins #litter #rubbish #trashtag #Manly #beachescouncil #loveManly #Manlybeach

Tired of seeing pictures like these? Stop buying balloons and tell your friends to stop buying them too. There are better ways to celebrate.
Balloons are in the top three most harmful waste items to wildlife. Birds and turtles not only ingest balloons, they actively select them as food. This is because a burst balloon often resembles a jellyfish, the natural food sources of many marine species like turtles.
Ingesting balloons, and the clips and strings attached to them, can cause intestinal blockages and results in a slow painful death through starvation. Marine animals don’t have the gastrointestinal pH levels to breakdown a balloon and for turtles, it may also cause floating syndrome. Trapped gases in the gut can cause a turtle to become buoyant, unable to dive for food—making them vulnerable to boat strikes and leading to starvation and severe dehydration. Balloons are the number 1 cause of death in sea birds such as Albatross and Mutton birds that have consumed plastic - google Lauren Roman doctoral thesis looking at the effects of plastics in marine birds in Australia and New Zealand to learn more.
Wildlife, both terrestrial and marine, can also become entangled in balloon ribbons or strings, causing injury or death through drowning, suffocation, or an inability to feed and avoid predators.
Even if balloons are disposed of "safely" they go to landfill where it may take up to 1,000 years to decompose, leaching potentially toxic substances into the soil and water. Why are some businesses still using balloons as "advertising fun"?
.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #balloons #balloonsblow #beachcleanup #beachescouncil #litter #beachcleanup #trashtag #plasticocean #trash #literati #rubbish #turtlekiller

This is a NEW product - Free Range Peeled Hard Boiled Eggs that you can buy at selected Woolworths stores. While many other companies are looking at reducing their single use plastic for print, "Sunny Queen Farms" are increasing theirs.
The problem with plastic is that most of it isn't biodegradable. It doesn't rot, like paper or food, so instead it can hang around in the environment for hundreds of years. More than eight million tonnes of plastic enters the world's oceans each year and most of that escapes from land. Experts think that by 2050, the amount of plastic in the ocean will weigh more than the amount of fish in the ocean. All animals, whether they live on land or in the sea, can be hurt by plastic. They can get trapped in bigger items such as carrier bags or food packaging. Birds, fish and shellfish can mistake plastic for food when it has broken down in to smaller pieces. One in three sea turtles, and around 90% of seabirds, have eaten it.They can't digest plastic so their stomachs can become full, meaning they don't have room for actual food. Each year, 100,000 animals in the sea are killed by plastic.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic
​

211 million kilos of plastic packaging waste was generated by Amazon last year! All the air pillows, bubble wrap, foam packaging and other plastic that they ship would circle the Earth 500 times, according to a new report from Oceana. Even worse, up to 10 million kilos of Amazon's plastic waste ended up polluting the world's freshwater and marine ecosystems last year. That's the equivalent of dumping a delivery van full of plastic into the oceans every 70 minutes! Most of their plastic isn't destined for recycling and instead goes into landfills, incinerators or just straight into the environment where it stays forever. That's just a few of the many reasons to stay away from Amazon!
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic

S.A. & W.A. = Single Use Plastic Bans
WA will start banning single-use plastics within three years.The State Government will ban plastic plates, cutlery, stirrers, polystyrene food containers, thick plastic bags, and the release of helium balloons by 2023. Other single-use plastic items like produce bags, microbeads and cotton buds will be phased out by 2026.
QLD & ACT = Single Use Plastic Draft legislation
When is it time for NSW?
Plastic pollution is one of the greatest threats to marine life and wildlife around the world.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #plastic

This is alarming that only 12% gets recycled and the rest either gets discarded into landfill, our oceans or burnt for fuel. The rate at which plastic break down, they will be around for many generations to come. So, do your bit to cut down your plastic usage not only for our present but for our future.
#northernbeachescleanupcrew #beachcleanup