Sustainable Coastlines

As part of our Enterprise Inquiry, we are helping Camp MERC to design the environmental aspect of their programme.  To be able to do this, we need to fully understand the message they want to communicate - about how much damage rubbish is doing to marine life.

Last week we were lucky enough to have Ryley Webster from Sustainable Coastlines come and talk to us about issues facing marine animals.

In this photo you can see Ryley talking to us about gyres - the massive rubbish islands that are caused by the rubbish being caught and collected in ocean currents.  The white patches on the map that he is showing us are the gyres.  What's really surprising is that some of these are in the middle of the ocean - far away from any land. It's very sad.

We talked about what actions we can take on an individual level to make a difference.  Some ideas are:

• Make sure your own rubbish is disposed of carefully
• Try to buy things that are not packaged - the less plastic we use, the less needs to be produced
• Don't walk past litter - pick it up!  It's everyone's problem, not just the owner of the rubbish
• Share the message with other people

We also learned a lot of new vocabulary to explain the problem.  Here are some of the words we learned:

Photodegrade

where somehing is broken down by light from the sun

Biodegrade

where something breaks down by natural processes

Nurdles

the tiny plastic beads that are the base product for most plastic items

Bio-accumulate

Sustainable Coastlines are in the process of creating resources about marine conservation that will be distributed to Primary and Intermediate schools around the country.  It was great to have Ryley along to support us and we will hopefully get to work with his organisation again as we go through our Inquiry.