Vicki Watson: Big rubbish tip hidden in country's beautiful beaches

Hundreds of butts were found at Kohimarama. Photo / Richard Robinson

With the days now longer and summer in sight, many people will soon be back at the beach to enjoy our wonderful coastline.

Clean, beautiful beaches are something most of us take for granted. Unfortunately, the pristine environment represented in the tourism brochures is not always what you find when you get down on the sand.

Water quality is top-of-mind with the recent threat from suspected toxins at popular North Shore beaches. And while the jury is still out on what's turning the sea slugs toxic, 70 per cent of marine pollution comes from the land. And this really comes down to what we do with our rubbish.

At the Sir Peter Blake Trust, we're very familiar with the state of our coastline. Every year our Care for Our Coast environmental programme sees us and the many schools and companies that partner with us, combing our beaches and waterways for litter.

Perhaps it would surprise you to know some of the statistics about the items we regularly turn up on some of our most popular beaches: disposable nappies, syringes and condoms. Among the more unusual are ammunition cartridges, carpet, truck batteries, mattresses and bicycles.

Care for our Coast is our learn-by-doing programme that aims to educate and encourage schools and communities to take responsibility for their local coastal areas and waterways.

We've carried out more than 530 clean-ups over the past four years, removing more than 375,000 pieces of litter that would otherwise have become marine debris.

The statistics are quite startling and vary around the country. For example, clean-ups of central Auckland beaches last year yielded 300 plastic bottle tops and 522 cigarette butts from St Heliers Bay and 700 cigarette butts from Kohimarama.

Add to this the 76 lighters found at Milford beach, and it would appear that these beaches are becoming large-scale ashtrays. And 1752 cigarette butts were found in one Coromandel clean-up alone.

Further down the country, a clean-up at Gisborne's Waikanae beach yielded 135 glass bottles, 337 metal bottle tops, 77 items of clothing, 217 lolly wrappers and 19 balloons. We can even claim to finding everything including the kitchen sink, a dishwasher and a rusty fridge.

More recently, there has been an explosion of plastic washing up ashore, with plastics now accounting for just over 53 per cent of all debris collected. Hard plastics are the second highest category of debris collected, and include the 3414 plastic bottle caps collected last year alone.

I hope these statistics will shock us all to think twice about the way we leave our beaches this summer.

Pollution is best described as the tragedy of the commons - the seemingly "free" resources that are taken for granted. It's the feeling that the beach is someone else's responsibility to clean up when in fact it's the responsibility of all who use it.

The consequences of worsening coastal pollution are wide ranging.

We risk damaging individual sea creatures and plants as well as whole communities of marine life. It will impact the way we use the sea for recreation and as a source of food, not to mention the spiritual and cultural significance of these areas.

Of course, a shining example of a New Zealander who was keenly aware of the fragile nature of the coast and its need for protection was Sir Peter Blake. His love of the sea from an early age preordained a professional life on the international waters, where he came to realise the deterioration of the quality of our own coastline needed action.

The Care for Our Coast programme is our response, at the Sir Peter Blake Trust, to his passion for the marine environment and is a practical way of ensuring his legacy lives on by developing environmental leaders to continue his work.

The challenge, as we comb the beaches for litter with the hundreds of school children who take part in the programme each year, is to inspire others to become good custodians of our environment and get them to realise how serious the problems are.

Care for our Coast has been embraced by more than 80 schools around the country.

Many community groups such as Spirit of Adventure and a growing number of corporates, such as Westpac and Fuji Xerox, have also got behind us in beach clean-ups too. Westpac, for example, uses a number of their annual volunteer days to get staff involved in beach clean-ups near their branches or assisting local primary schools with their clean-ups.

The bank's staff can proudly claim being responsible for removing more than 250,000 pieces of rubbish to date.

In the spirit of the late Sir Peter Blake each and every one of us needs to realise that the coastline is a treasure and do something to protect it.

Food for thought as we roll into summer.

* Vicki Watson is general manager of the Sir Peter Blake Trust.