New South Wales Tracking Trash Campaign
4 Apr 2017
The “Hey Tosser!” campaign is being launched in Australia later on this week where Australian politician Gareth Ward will toss a handful of bottles into Mullet Creek. For this campaign, 40 plastic bottles being tracked by GPS trackers will be tossed into lakes, rivers and harbors all over the state by the NSW Environment Protection Authority in the hopes of demonstrating how litter travels after it’s made its way into the waterways.
A lot of community members don’t realize exactly where litter goes after they toss it at bus stops, on the streets, and on the beaches and highways. This campaign will give the community a real visual of where litter ends up after it’s been discarded into the community.
Almost 25,000 tons of litter, according to Mr. Ward, was discarded in NSW every year which costed the state over $180 million to clean up.
Almost 75 percent of marine debris that was found by the CSIRO in Sydney Harbour, rivers and other surrounding beaches is generated locally and made of plastic. Darling Harbour and Cockle Bay, which are in the Sydney maritime area, were considered the worst locations with around 2,456 pieces of trash per 1,000 sq. meter being recorded, not including the litter that is underneath the surface.
A big priority of this campaign is to keep the environment clean and decrease litter volume by 40 percent by the year 2020. Additional content will be provided to continue educating the NSW community regarding littering and how every bit of it is noticed.
The location of where the bottles were launched was carefully chosen to ensure the message of the campaign gets to all NSW residents in all NSW areas.
A GPS tracking device on each bottle will help scientists track the bottles’ locations on a daily basis. Updates and the progress of the bottles will be posted up on the campaign’s Facebook page allowing the bottles’ journey to be seen by all community members.
Community members are asked to not interfere with the bottles’ journey. Every bottle will have a state on it that describes how important the project is and in case people find one and can’t get it back into the water, there will also be a self-addressed envelope inside the enclosed case.
All bottles are expected to be collected by the end of April.
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