Volunteer : Tick.

I opted to do a beach clean up as my act of volunteering. As I live on an island (albeit a rather large island), I think it's important to protect our coastlines. I love going to the beach and the last thing you want to see when you're playing in the sand is a bunch of trash.

So yesterday I joined a clean up effort which focused on Takapuna Beach on Auckland's North Shore. The clean up was organised/hosted by Sustainable Coastlines which is a charity focusing on NZ beaches and foreshores. Admittedly at a first glance anyone would think the beach was clean. I certainly did. But it's surprising what you can find when you take a deeper look. I found lots of bottle caps and cigarette butts. But I also found empty beer/wine bottles, 2 used and broken flipflops (or jandals as we call them in New Zealand), a condom (gross!), a lighter and several kids toys. It definitely has me thinking about when I bring drinks to the beach in future to ensure that my bottle caps or tops are properly collected rather than just winding up rubbish on the beach.

At the end I probably had roughly 1.5-2kg (3-4.5 lbs) worth of stuff in my bag and I was one of about 20 people cleaning up the beach.