Nothing had prepared the twenty citizen volunteers who had signed up with Coastal Impact (CI), the Goa based NGO to clean up the pristine Grande Island for the quantum of litter they saw on the island’s main beach on Sunday, April 30.
‘Oh my God!’ was the uniform reaction from the group of volunteers which comprised German University interns, freelance journalists, IT professionals, amateur and professional divers and social workers who reached the island in two motor boats armed with plastic gloves, gunny sacks and loads of enthusiasm.
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.
Coastal Impact and its sister concern, Barracuda Diving has been conducting this volunteer driven underwater and beach clean-up on the Grande Island for the last 19 years on the last Sunday of April every year.
The first boat comprising 10 volunteers reached about an hour ahead of the second boat. The ten-member team began work on the beach immediately, while the volunteers from the second boat were guided later by the Barracuda Diving instructors to look for garbage and junk underwater. Waste management being a topic close to our heart, my wife and I had also volunteered to clean up the island.
Sections of the beach were quickly earmarked for the different type 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 plates and ferry it to the relevant sections. As the hours ticked by and the sun became more intense, the garbage piles also began to mount. 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 which began at around 9:45am in the morning concluded around one pm, a good three hours later. Then began the equally laborious task of sacking all the litter into gunny bags. The final count was a mind-boggling 45 gunny bags of garbage comprising a mind-boggling 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. 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 oHeraldo, Venkat Charloo, trustee, Coastal India (CI) said that CI had been undertaking this exercise on Grande Island on the last Sunday of April every year from the year 1998. “We undertake the clean-up at the end of the season. If we began collecting the waste on a monthly basis during the tourist season, it would just come back. This is why we tackle the problem once every year to ensure that the ecosystem can rest and recover during the monsoon,” Charloo said.
Coastal Impact routinely undertakes underwater marine surveys for organisations like the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) in Goa, Lakshadweep, Karnataka and Maharashtra. They also conduct marine awareness programmes in schools across Goa.
