PANJIM: In a special drive, the team of scientists from CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) collected over 1000 kilograms of plastic within just a one-kilometre-stretch of Caranzalem.
CSIR-NIO had taken up the drive to clean up the beach on Saturday as a part of the International Coastal Cleanup Day 2019 in association with National Centre for Coastal Research and Union Ministry of Earth Sciences. More than 130 staff and students of NIO participated in the drive led by Director Sunil Kumar Singh.
“The clean up was made around one km long along the beach at Caranzalem, out of which 1,078 kg of plastics, 486 kg of organic waste including papers, and other organic trash, 720 glass bottles and 125 metal cans were recovered,” NIO spokesperson said on Monday.
The trash was handed over to the Corporation of City of Panjim (CCP) for scientific treatment.
NIO official said that the public’s addiction to single-use plastic and the lack of plastic waste management have resulted in a global epidemic of plastic pollution.
“The 20 trash items collected in this clean sea drive are PET bottle caps of various types, packaging plastics (maximum) includes ‘chuna’ bottles, potato chips packet, milk packets and many kinds of food packaging, toothpaste, toothbrushes, fishing nets (pieces), whole Tarpaulin sheets, plastics spoons, straws, nylon fibres, plastic cups, glasses, pens including sketch pens, lots of fragmented pieces of plastics of different colours, small toys, plastic decorative items, plastic disposable cups, plastics bags, foam etc,” he said.
He said that the International Coastal Cleanup began more than 30 years ago and in that time the public’s plastic consumption has increased.
“We now know that plastic has a negative impact and we know where it is coming from. We now need to clean up our pollution, and more importantly, we need to cut it off at the source,” he added.
