The En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) joined hun­dreds of thou­sands of oth­er vol­un­teers world­wide on Sep­tem­ber 17, to clean coastal ways and record the types of de­bris found as part of the an­nu­al In­ter­na­tion­al Coastal Clean-up (ICC). This year, the EMA re­turned to Man­zanil­la Beach and in just two hours, 150 vol­un­teers col­lect­ed and record­ed 9,414 items of rub­bish, which fit in­to 168 jum­bo-sized garbage bags weigh­ing 2,183 lbs on just a por­tion of the beach. Man­ag­er of the EMA's Cor­po­rate Re­la­tions and Pub­lic Ed­u­ca­tion De­part­ment, Tisha Mara­jh, ap­plaud­ed all the hard work­ing vol­un­teers who came to Man­zanil­la. She said: "The EMA would like to fur­ther evolve this clean-up with more pub­lic aware­ness cam­paigns and stronger col­lab­o­ra­tion among the en­vi­ron­men­tal au­thor­i­ties."

Mara­jh al­so thanked CEPEP, Carib Glass­works Ltd and Re­cy­cling In Mo­tion for as­sist­ing with the col­lec­tion and re­cy­cling of the garbage. "A ma­jor part of this project is the sus­tain­abil­i­ty dri­ve with re­spect to re­cy­cling. The glass, plas­tics and alu­minum col­lect­ed will be re­cy­cled rather than dumped in the land­fill." Forestry Di­vi­sion Of­fi­cer, David Boodoo, who is re­spon­si­ble for the wildlife projects in Man­zanil­la, al­so ex­pressed his sup­port to the EMA for co-co­or­di­nat­ing the clean-up here. He wel­comed the clean-up since the beach at­tracts lots of vis­i­tors and with it comes a high con­cen­tra­tion of lit­ter. He al­so stressed: "This beach re­quires a high de­gree of main­te­nance be­cause it is a tur­tle nest­ing site, and beach lit­ter will af­fect the nat­ur­al lay­ing for leatherback tur­tles." Pres­i­dent of the EMA's Youth Am­bas­sadors, Ron­delle Keller said: "It is wor­ry­ing that peo­ple are not lis­ten­ing to our en­vi­ron­men­tal mes­sages. Cit­i­zens should love their coun­try enough to keep it clean for our fu­ture gen­er­a­tions."