Gift to Nature- Cleaning Our Beach

Have you ever taken a walk at our beaches on campus with your friends and enjoy our seashore area?

A group of green team volunteers, students, staff and residents have come together in 2021 to form a new group of “Clean the Beach”. They have organised regular beach clean-up activities to create a better environment for the marine life.  The volunteer group has gathered around 200 participants from different backgrounds after the announcement sharing the same passion on taking green actions.

Before the clean-up activities, different kinds of rubbishes including polyfoam boxes, fishing nets, plastic bottles could be found on the beach. Our volunteers were divided into different teams and cleaned up the area for 1-2 hours in each activity . Over 10-20 bags of rubbishes were collected with their efforts and sweat.

Hong Kong’s marine pollution problem has been exposed because of the tropical cyclones, improper trash disposal and floating from other locations, for which it battered the city in the dumping piles of rubbish on its beaches and coastline. Plastics (including microplastics) will take hundreds of years to break down and they could accumulate in our oceans and food chain year on year. Microplastics can be mistaken for food by birds and marine life and cause harm to them.

As to conserve our nature, we could all take our part to separate the waste for proper disposal, and not to leave any trash at the beach.  Some green team members even organised a hiking trip to clean up the trail in Little Hawaii Falls before Christmas. 10 bags of trash were collected by 13 volunteers, sharing the joy of the hike while leaving a clean space as a gift back to our nature.   

If you want to participate in the clean up group, please drop us an email at green@ust.hk. We look forward to have you joining our community!