M.A.D.(Making A Difference)

At Renton Beach

The Year 5 students were asked to help clean up one of our beautiful South Auckland beaches. Our focus was to remove all plastic washed up on the tide. Why plastic you might ask? Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Do you know what happens when something biodegrades? You know when you’re eating an apple and you leave it lying around and it goes all brown? That’s because small animals called bacteria are starting to eat away the apple – making it biodegrade.  

This doesn’t happen to plastic. Instead, plastic ‘photodegrades’, meaning that the sun makes it weak and breaks it into smaller and smaller pieces, that still don’t go away. This plastic is harmful to sea animals. Some eat the plastic or get tangled up in it and they usually suffer and die because of it. We love our coast and decided to go M.A.D. Making A Difference in our community to sustain our planet.

The Year 5 students have arrived at Renton Beach ready to clean up our coastline.

Walking along the coastline we noticed unusual shapes in the rock formations.
It looked a if liquid rock had poured down to the waters edge and hardened as it met the cold sea, leaving a tidal mark of petrified stone waves. 

The smooth edges and layering effect made great natural steps.

Rubbish still managed to find its way into all the nooks and crannys.

With our bags beginning to fill with plastic rubbish we needed a rest.

John and Maria did a great job hunting out plastic trash.

Kaylis managed to find a taniwha face imprinted in this rock.
Can you see it?

A great bunch of kids doing their bit to save our waterways.

There is always time for a dab :-)

We managed to collect more than a dozen bags of rubbish in the short time we were at the beach.

Dab!

Ardmore and Judelexus, satisfied and exhausted after cleaning the beach of plastic to help save our waterways and our sealife.