Tangaroa Blue Ocean Care Society will be hosting a screening of the new, award-winning environmental documentary Bag It at The Wildlife Habitat, Port Douglas on Friday 24th February, 2012.

Bag It follows “everyman” Jeb Berrier as he tries to make sense of our dependence on plastic bags. Although his quest starts out small, Jeb soon learns that the problem extends past landfills to oceans, rivers and ultimately human health.

Australians use 3.92 billion plastic bags a year, that's over 10 million new bags being used every day. This single-use mentality has led to an estimated 50 million bags entering the Australian litter stream every year. Unless they are collected, they remain in the environment and accumulate at a staggering rate and create a real threat to marine life and seabirds.

The film explores these issues and identifies how our daily reliance on plastic threatens not only waterways and marine life, but human health, too. Two of the most common plastic additives are endocrine disruptors, which have been shown to link to cancer, diabetes, autism, attention deficit disorder, obesity and infertility.

Tangaroa Blue Ocean Care Society recognizes the importance of reducing single-use plastic use for the safety of our community and environment. During beach clean up events held in the Far North Queensland over 80% of items found are plastic, and many of these plastic packaging items.

Screening Date: Friday 24th February, 2012
Screening Time: 6.30pm
Screening Location: Wildlife Habitat, Port Douglas
Admission: Gold coin donation                                                           

For additional information, please contact Heidi Taylor at 0410166684 or heidi@oceancare.org.au 

Tangaroa Blue Ocean Care Society's main objective for 2011 has been to consolidate the annual WA Beach Cleanup into a state-wide event. This has been achieved with cleanup activity occurring in each coastal region from the south coast through to the Kimberley coast and out to the Cocos Keeling and Christmas Islands. About 50 organisations and over 1200 volunteers combined their energies to produce this successful outcome. South West Marine Debris Project monthly monitoring activities have also continued along the Capes coast in 2011 with two additional sites - Yeagarup on the western south coast and Dalyellup Beach near Bunbury being added to the programme. Additional cleanups at Deepdene and Boranup were also funded during the year and valuable data was obtained for these targeted sites.

This year's annual WA Beach Cleanup produced 75,832 items of debris. Seventy seven percent of these were plastic and the most numerous item was remnant bits and pieces of plastic. Our revamped cleanup signature shows 47% of items falling into the "remnants and breakage" category, 28% into "packaging" and 13% into "consumer articles". In this report we are introducing a second set of categories which provide an indication of the type of activity which generated the marine debris being found within a site, area or region. By this measure, in this year's cleanup, "individual consumption", which includes articles and packaging related to individual consumption of food, drink and cigarettes, generated 34% of the items collected. "Plastic remnant accumulation" (the legacy of past activities) also accounted for 34% while "commercial fishing" generated 16% and "recreational fishing" and "individual activities" generated 6% each. Averaged over the whole state our litter and local source index shows 46% of items were from local origins while the remaining 54% had a non local origin such as shipping and oceanic circulation.

Download the full report from the Downloads section or by clicking here.

The coming summer months will bring the ‘tourist’ out in all of us as we head to the local waterways to enjoy the great outdoors and get some relief from the heat. One thing to be aware of, is to collect litter in our natural environment during the tourist season, as plastics are a major threat to our ocean life and every piece less that goes into the ocean is a bonus.

Everyone can do their bit  by just picking up every piece of litter that can be seen and on December 3rd branches of the community marine conservation group, Ocean & Coastal Care Initiatives (OCCI) organised a "Marine Debris Survey" at sites in central NSW including Terrigal, Copacabana, Lake Macquarie and Port Stevens.

“As well as collecting rubbish from our lakes and beaches, this clean-up is designed to go that one step further,” said event co-ordinator, Linda Roberts. “All of the collected litter was recorded and sent to a national data-base for marine debris, organised by Tangaroa Blue Ocean Care Society. The idea is to find out the origin of our local marine litter so that steps can be taken to reduce debris at its source.”

So what did make up the marine debris collected along NSW's central coast?

A total of 5km of coastline was cleaned at the 4 clean up sites with the help of 66 volunteers who donated a total of 126 hours to help protect their local marine environment.

Their efforts removed 5327 individual pieces of marine debris with the most common item removed, with a total of 700 being cigarette butts. Coming in second was broken down pieces of plastic bags and other film remnants with a total of 475. The most unusual item found was at Lake Macquarie where three bunches of nylon roses where collected!

Breaking down the data showed that 59.4% of the debris collected was made of plastic with 29% of that being plastic packaging including plastic bags, lids and bottletops, plastic drink bottles and film remnants. Plastics can take hundreds of years to break down in the marine environment, forever breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, but forever remaining in the environment. This type of degraded and broken down plastic is also easily confused as food for marine animals and seabirds, potentially killing the animal or bird that eats it.

After plastics the other eight categories showed 10% metal, 8.6% glass, 7.3% paper, 6.9% foam, 2.8% rubber, 1.7% miscellaneous items, 1.4% cloth and 1.3% wood.

OCCI is hoping that the community will get behind this initiative and become proactive in reducing the amount of litter in the region which will also make a significant difference to our oceans.

For more information about OCCI and their projects, contact Linda Roberts on email: lindaroberts4@bigpond.com or mobile: 0404450429.

The Marine Debris Clean Up and Survey is supported by the Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority through the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country Program.

Since winter this year, the Coffee Club in Port Douglas, Queensland has been lending a hand to local not-for-profit organisations by providing them a spot to display information about their cause and also letting their customers know how to get involved in volunteering.

Michael and the Coffee Club Port Douglas team also donated 50c from every coffee sold during the middle Wednesday in each month to the nominated not-for -profit, giving a boost in fundraising to help them continue their community work!

Tangaroa Blue was lucky enough to display information on marine debris during August and September and would like to thank Michael and the team for their kind donation and opportunity to spread the word on marine debris and how everyone can help to protect our oceans!