Our Beach Busters campaign, in association with Sustainable Coastlines, continues this weekend as hundreds of people take to the stunning Matakana Coast to spruce it up for summer.
Pleasingly, some of the top acts in a music festival will be joining the litter-busters before they start playing. More pleasingly still, the campaign has got to the bottom of a mystery: the source of thousands of bright-blue plastic shavings that had been baffling beachcombers and clean-up crews in the upper North Island.
It transpires that the small chips come from Korean fishing vessels: crews drill hundreds of holes in large plastic barrels which are used as traps for blind eels, a delicacy in some parts of Asia. The Kiwi second skipper of one such vessel has vowed to be more careful and the rest of the fleet will now know that the spotlight is on them.
It's a welcome reassurance early in the campaign that work like this has the potential not just to clean up rubbish, but to stop it from being dumped in the first place - to address the problem at the source, so to speak.
In an ideal world, of course, all pollution, including beach litter, would be addressed at the source, but this is not an ideal world. And initiatives such as Beach Busters give us all the chance to make a difference.
