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The seventh annual Talley’s sponsored beach cleanup of Stewart Island is under way from June 12 to 17, with Mike Black calling for more volunteers for the sorting facility.
Mike Black has been doing beach cleanup’s with his dad, Tracker Black, for 50 years. Nowadays, he’s part of the team that cleans the beaches on Stewart Island.
Starting bright and early at 8am on June 12, Black and his team will have a quick breakfast before being choppered to the drop-off location on the island.
Every day of the cleanup is a full eight hours, Black said.
This year’s cleanup is the 7th biannual Talley’s-sponsored event and will focus on the western coastline of Stewart Island from Doughboy Bay to Mason Bay and up to Waituna Bay.
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The team has already been selected, among them are volunteers from the Southern Coastal Charitable trust and people from the fishing industry, but Black encourages any keen trampers on the island to take part.
“The wind and ocean currents come down the West Coast, and we get household rubbish, industrial rubbish and fishing gear on our Southern beaches from Nelson to the Netherlands.”
Black said they even see fish carcasses washed up from South America.
In recent years, however, the teams have found more and more domestic rubbish and Black said they find a lot more “fragile stuff” and “metres and metres” of plastic domestic irrigation piping.
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One of the main things that cleanup teams see these days is household rubbish, industrial rubbish and fishing gear.
Held every second year, the sponsored beach cleanups are in partnership with the Southern Coastal Charitable Trust who started beach cleanups in the Fiordland area in 2001.
Joyce Kolk is an administrator and co-ordinator of the beach cleanups. She said the Trust work within four areas in Fiordland cleaning up beaches.
However, she said Stewart Island gets more rubbish than anywhere else.
“They’re [beach cleanups] meant to be biannually but Stewart Island, you could do that yearly,” she said.
The trust are “indebted” to the fishing industry who are the Trusts’ “main supporter”. Kolk said they want to get rid of the rubbish as much as anyone else.
Black is Talley’s Bluff depot supervisor and this year, he is calling for more volunteers to help sort the rubbish that gets collected and transported to the Bluff sorting facility.
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Black has called for more volunteers to help out at the sorting facility in Bluff.
Cleanup teams pick anything that is hand-sized or bigger which is then sent to a sorting facility in Bluff.
That part of the cleanup is where Black is calling for more volunteers , to help sort out the refuse.
“Anything that’s reusable or repairable, including seafood industry gear that gets lost during storms, like rock lobster bait holders or buoys, is returned to the company that made it or given to a fisher and put back into service.”
Kolk said many hands make light work at the sorting facility and anyone interested in helping out should “get in touch”.
Volunteers at the sorting facility in Bluff help process what rubbish can and can’t be salvaged. Anything that can’t be saved is sent away to be chipped and recycled.
The cleanup team actively work to revive any fishing gear found and continue relationships with local fishers on ways to reduce waste. Black said they “certainly” don’t discard fishing gear on purpose.