I like it when people from all walks of life come together for a good cause, and I saw this at the first beach clean-up organised by Guardians of Mother Earth at Bagan Lalang Beach, Sepang. It was really great that friends and total strangers came together, many with whole families in tow. In fact, the organiser, Mei Boh, was surprised by the overwhelming response, because over 60 people came.
Although it rained in the Klang Valley in the early hours of the morning when we set out, we were blessed with great weather – clouds protected us from the strong sunlight typical at beaches, enabling us to collect all the rubbish we could find over 2 hours. We were thankful to Mei Kuan for sponsoring the equipment to help us, such as gloves and thongs, among other things.
We were divided into 5 groups, and each group covered a different section of the beach. Some went to the sandy area exposed at low tide, some pulled out rubbish from between large stones in a rocky area, while some combed the grassy area where people had their picnics and barbecues.
Some volunteers washed dirty plastic plates and other plastic objects before putting them aside in bags specifically reserved for recyclable items. Au Yong from ICycle advised us to put recyclable items in clear plastic bags and unrecyclable rubbish in black plastic bags. So the sorted recyclable items could be recycled later.
Mohd Faisal Abdur Rani from Let’s Do It Malaysia brought his weighing scale, and he weighed all the rubbish we collected.
It turned out that we collected 200 kg of trash in 2 hours! We were amazed that the Bagan Lalang Beach had so much rubbish.
After we finished collecting the rubbish, we had a short meditation session led by Susee Ram, followed by sharing sessions and refreshments. The first sharing session was by Au Yong from ICycle, and the second sharing was by Mohd Faisal. Faisal showed us how to make eco bricks.
All in all, it was a fabulous day and we returned home satisfied that we had done something good for the environment to end the year on a positive note.
Project Prose 