Last Friday morning the Save Our World Team headed down to Kite Beach to take part in A Beach Clean Up Dubai with some helpers.  The sky was blue, the sun was out and the water was totally gorgeous.  It was really early and not too hot but we still took plenty of water with us (in reusable bottles, of course).

The organisers said it was the biggest turn out they have ever had for their beach clean ups which was great.  There were even two ladies there who were artists and wore dresses made out of rubbish to show how much waste people make in just one week.  Crazy and scary!

Everyone got to work collecting cigarette butts and other plastic items for just over an hour.

You know, Kite Beach looks so gorgeous and really there is not a lot of rubbish lying around at all BUT when you look closely you can see loads of cigarette butts lying just underneath the first layer of sand. Cigarette butts don’t break down easily at all because they are made up of a type of plastic which is not bio-degradable as well as lots of other chemicals.

Sea life and birds mistake the little bits of plastic for food and they get really sick when they eat them or  can even die.  The weird thing is that when we were looking for the butts in the sand, a lot of the time we missed them because they turn white after time and can look just the same colour as shells in the sand.  NOT GOOD!

When everyone had finished the clean up some people made art from the butts we had collected.  There were bucket loads of them unfortunately. The art was fantastic but we’d probably prefer not to have to make such a statement!

The beach cup clean ups happen every 2 weeks on Kite Beach and there are loads more in Dubai and other Emirates so you can get involved some time.  It was fun and felt good to make a difference before the weekend had even started.

Bye for now,

The Save Our World Team