Anova’s annual beach clean up was held at Mertasari Beach Sanur this year on the morning of the 10^th June. Together, we collected ~20kg of plastic along this stretch of beach, which was actually significantly less than last year – probably due to the season (rainy season tends to see more plastic washed up on the shores, and this clean up was during the dry season).

At the end of the activity, we sorted through all the waste collected and organized it in different waste types such as packaging sachets, straws, bottles, caps etc. This was an interesting activity to do as it allowed us to visualize and understand the different waste types and see the most common items. The most common waste types collected were drinking cups and drink bottles, as well as snack packets and chips packets.

The plastic drinking cups are collected by waste pickers and sold off for recycling, thus, we donated all of these ‘items of value’ to a waste picker that approached us at the beach. Hard plastic types such as HDPE and PP we took back to the Ocean Bound Plastic workshop – Anova’s plastic recycling CSR project – where this was processed further. The hard plastic is sorted according to HDPE or PP type, labels removed, washed and sorted by colour. It was then shredded and turned into a wall hanging clock that now tells us the time at our workshop.