On Sunday, May
6, 2018, twenty-five citizen volunteers will travel in two boats to St George’s island off
the coast of Goa on a beach-cleaning mission. The volunteers will be part of
Goa based NGO Coastal Impact’s annual St George’s island beach clean-up
activity. Coastal Impact, which is the social arm of the Barracuda Diving
Company, has been cleaning up this island beach for the last 20 years, usually
on the last Sunday of April each year.
This correspondent,
who was one of the volunteers last year, has enrolled this year too. Last year,
the volunteers came back with a mind-boggling 45 gunny bags of waste, which
included 20 bags of plastic bottles, 15 bags of beer and assorted liquor
bottles, three bags of footwear, two bags of thermocole and five bags of
assorted junk. While one half of the volunteers had cleaned the beach, the
others were guided by the Barracuda Diving instructors to look for garbage and
junk underwater.
The litter on the
main beach had to be seen to be believed. There were hundreds of beer and
alcohol bottles, plastic water bottles, assorted footwear, food wrappers,
thermocole and even medical waste like syringes, vials, etc.
Sections of the beach
were quickly earmarked for the different types of litter. One section for glass
bottles, another for footwear, the third for plastic bottles and so forth. It
was a laborious task. Each volunteer had to physically pick every single item,
put it into a makeshift bag or paper plate and ferry it to the relevant
sections. Even broken bottles were collected and sacked in gunny bags. The
underwater team also salvaged a lot of junk. These included beer bottles,
footwear and assorted plastic items.
The clean-up lasted
for nearly four hours. Closer to 2pm, the group formed a human chain and
transferred the bags into one of the motor boats. The main beach was finally
clean and seemed to be breathing easy after having been ravaged by garbage for
a whole year. All the 45 bags were despatched to Clinton Vaz’s vRecycle waste
management services warehouse at Corlim for recycling.
Speaking to Café,
Venkat Charloo, trustee, Coastal India (CI) said that CI had been undertaking
this exercise on St George’s island on the last Sunday of April every year
since 1998. “We chose to clean up St George’s island beach because this was the
beach that sees a lot of picnic trips and it is the one with the most trash. We
tackle the problem once every year to ensure that the ecosystem can rest and
recover during the monsoons,” Venkat said.
According to Venkat,
the only way forward was to spread awareness and educate the general public.
When contacted,
Sanjit Rodrigues, Managing Director, Goa Waste Management Corporation (GWMC)
said, “It is commendable that Coastal Impact has done such a clean-up
consistently over all these years. We would be committed to supplement this
effort in some way or the other.”
According to
Rodrigues, a permanent mechanism was required. “The current beach cleaning
mechanism should be immediately extended to St George’s island. The beach
cleaning operations are handled by the Department of Tourism. The current
contractor should be asked to extend services there. The periodicity can be
decided,” Rodrigues said.
However, when asked
if the boatmen ferrying tourists to such islands from the various jetties
should be forced to pay a deposit to ensure that they bring back the waste
created by the tourists, Rodrigues said, “This aspect needs to be worked upon
with stakeholders, concerned licencing authorities, concerned local bodies,
Department of Tourism, Travel and Tourism association of Goa, GWMC, NGOs, etc.
A combined effort to understand, educate and implement is required. We will be
happy to give it a start.”
Rodrigues confirmed
that the waste collected by Coastal Impact on May 6 could be sent to the state
overnment’s waste treatment plant at Saligao.
“Of
course, we will receive the waste,” Rodrigues said.
