Beneath the surface of Sydney harbour, a persistent and insidious problem has been growing. While tourists and locals alike marvel at the iconic waters, few realise that beneath the waves, plastic waste has accumulated over years of neglect and unchecked urban runoff. Every storm unleashes a torrent of plastic through the city’s drains, feeding an underwater landfill of bottles, fragments, and packaging that quietly settle onto the harbour’s floor as well as alarming levels of pollution are constantly washing up on our harbour beaches. It is clear we need to clean up our act.

This week in Geneva 172 countries, including Australia which is the second-highest generator of single-use plastic waste per person globally, after Singapore, will participate in the United Nations Environment Program Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee which is set to discuss and develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. The chair opened the meeting stating that plastic pollution constituted an urgent and insidious threat to ecosystems, economies and human health. The magnitude of the crisis was evident; without significant intervention, the amount of plastic entering the environment annually by 2040 was expected to nearly double compared to 2022. The Lancet Journal warned that plastic had become a “danger” to humanity that was causing disease and death from infancy to old age and that plastics pose grave, growing, and under-appreciated dangers to human and planetary health.

Meanwhile, here on the Northern Beaches, Council received $500,000 in grants from the NSW EPA to tackle the problem of littering which we know is largely plastic. Now running for 12 months this Green and Clean Northern Beaches program promised a Northern Beaches Council Litter Prevention Roadmap to provide a strategic framework under which a range of stakeholders would collaborate to achieve the “cleanest public places in Sydney”. So, where is this roadmap, its status and visibility remain unclear. Is it as potholed as our actual roads? What does it take to stop the unrelenting tide of pollution washing into the harbour?

To highlight the need for action rather than more studies, Surfrider Foundation Northern Beaches, among other NFP volunteer groups, IS taking action. With no funding from grants, just volunteers, the Surfrider Foundation has asked everyone to Adopt a Beach.

https://www.surfrider.org.au/impact/adoptabeach/

You can help by bringing your own cup for a takeaway or if that is too difficult then ask ‘no lid’. Do your really need your name or order written on it? #adoptabeachaus

Since February, when the Adopt a Beach program was launched across six beaches, volunteer numbers have doubled to over 134 participants and increased the number of adopted beaches from six to nine. To date, across 47 events at nine beaches— including Little Manly, Manly Cove, and Manly Ocean Beach—the Surf Rider Foundation volunteers have collected 25,744 items of litter, including food & beverage, personal hygiene products, sport toys and building supplies, weighing a total of 622 kg. This figure does not include the debris removed daily by the Council’s mechanical beach cleaning machines.