7 Benefits of Cleaning Up Your Local Beach
If you visit any beach almost anywhere in the world, you are bound to stumble upon evidence of humanity scattered everywhere. Bits of plastic, cigarette butts, and balloons are very common to find on beaches on every continent. Going out of your way to collect litter on beaches has various benefits, from improving the local economy to saving animals. Continue reading to learn more about the benefits of cleaning up your local beaches.
7 Benefits of Cleaning Up Your Local Beach
1. You Save Marine Creatures
In recent years, the world has been hit by frequent headlines about marine animals that died from consumption or getting trapped by waste that has been dumped in oceans. When our waste washes up on beaches, it offers us a chance to remove it before the tide comes in to carry it back. Eliminating rubbish that is washed up on coastlines guarantees that marine wildlife will not come into contact with this toxic waste and maybe find itself harmed in one way or the other.
2. You Preserve Our Natural Treasures
Beaches are magnificent and diverse natural gems that are here for all of us to enjoy and explore together. Unfortunately, garbage on our coastlines jeopardizes these natural resources. By cleaning up our coastlines, you ensure that people from across the globe can enjoy our beaches.
3. You Remove Toxic Contaminants From The Water
Cigarette butts are the most common litter item in the world. As you may expect, this trash is one of the most commonly found bits of litter in the ocean. Cigarette butts are tiny, but they have a huge impact on clean water. Within just one hour of exposure, a single cigarette can contaminate nearly 8 litres with dangerous and unhealthy chemicals. If you collected just 10 cigarette butts in the course of your day, you would be saving almost 800 litres of clean water from contamination.
4. You Help The Local Economy
Ocean-side communities across the globe get a big boost to their economies from both tourism and fishing. When beaches are free of garbage, visitors and tourists are much more likely to spend cash at businesses in coastal towns and cities. If the water is free of trash, fishermen and tourism-based businesses such as scuba diving tours are more likely to earn a good living. Your clean-up effort will ultimately help boost the local economy.
5. You Create a Safer Environment
Trash isn’t just ugly, it is also very dangerous. Pieces of metal and glass with sharp edges can create a public health risk as well as make the environment look unappealing. This type of garbage can easily hide in the sand and accidentally injure people walking on beaches. If you come across trash like this, be careful when collecting it so as not to injure yourself. Corporate community support may help you to create a safe environment too.
6. You Can Dispose of Waste The Right Way
One of the amazing things about picking up litter yourself is that you get the chance to dispose of the trash you collect the right way. So many compostable and recyclable pieces of the trash find their way into landfills, where they cannot disintegrate properly. When you are collecting trash, make sure to compost and recycle what you can.
7. You Make Seafood Safer
It’s widely known that what goes into the ocean eventually ends up inside your body, especially if you love eating seafood. Research done by the Ghent University in Belgium revealed that the average consumer of seafood eats about 11,000 fragments of plastic each year. The toxins in these fragments can accumulate in our bodies over time and ultimately cause health complications. It is therefore important to clean our coastlines if we want to have a healthier population.
