The Seisia community does its part in the 2025 Great Barrier Reef Clean-up, filling up a ute tray with washed-up plastic waste and debris. Photo: Supplied.
With another wet season onslaught of debris fast approaching, a young leader in Seisia has committed to keeping her community’s beach clean year-round after a statewide effort to protect the Great Barrier Reef from plastic pollution.
Talei Elu invited Seisia residents to do their part for the 2025 Great Barrier Reef Clean-up.
By the end of the day on 25 October, the Seisia group had collected enough debris to fill a ute tray.
“Water bottles, squid lures, a lot of marine rope and fishing lines – those were the usual culprits,” Ms Elu said.
“There was also a lot of smaller, disintegrated microplastics – the type where you try to pick it up and it just disintegrates in your hand.
“I always try to get as much as I can, even if it includes me picking up some of the sand with that because they’re probably the ones getting into our ecosystem and contributing the microplastics in marine life and animals.”
After the event, Ms Elu committed to organising a small beach clean-up at the end of every month except December.
She said the wet season would again fill the beachfront with debris.
“In wet season, the tides are much higher, the storm surges are more intense, so a lot of marine debris comes with those storm surges that wash everything back up onto the beach,” she said.
“Even though we’re cleaning the beach now, come December, January, February, all the plastic will be back.
“This is why it has to be consistent. Otherwise, if we don’t get it early enough, it will disintegrate being left out in the sun for ages and get into the ecosystem.”
She encouraged everyone to continue playing their small part, even outside of official clean-up events.
“Me and my family collect every time we go down to the beach just around where we gather,” Ms Elu said.
“I know a local family here, their kids do the PickUp3, a thing they learn in school that if you even pick up three pieces of rubbish, that helps.
“I think people are pretty proactive when they see something they know shouldn’t be there.”
The statewide 2025 Great Barrier Reef Clean-up, a major environmental campaign organised by Tangaroa Blue and Clean Up Australia, involved community-hosted clean-ups at local beaches, rivers and creeks throughout October.
