For the past few years, I’ve lived in the Bahamas. Being lucky, we are surrounded by beautiful beaches and ocean. However, citizens and tourists often pollute, being too careless to put their trash in a garbage. Additionally, our oceans transport lots of plastics and debris, eventually washing up on our Bahama beaches. This means that to keep our beaches and overall environment clean, we need to make an effort and pick up our trash. This is something that I have noticed and now, beach clean ups are a frequent activity for me to do.

April 29th, 2018 – Coral Harbor Beach, Nassau, Bahamas

My friend, Isabella, joined me to tidy up Coral Harbor Beach. My grandparents live on this beach so I have easy access to it and can relax and get some shade or food whenever I need to. At 11:30 am, Isabella arrived at my grandparent’s house and we started to work at 11:50 am. Before this, we gathered things that we needed: plastic bags to collect the debris and gloves to pick up debris.

After the clean-up, we noticed that glass bottles were the most common item washed up on the beach and in the shallow waters. Most of them were complete, but there were also many small, broken pieces of glass. We also found plastic bags, food wrappers, clothing and wooden planks. Occasionally we found every-day items such as wallets and toothbrushes.

At around 3:30 pm, Isabella and I took a break from the sun to have a snack. Then, went back outside at 4:15 pm, where we worked until about 6:45 pm. This time, the beach was mostly clean of trash and our six hours of work had paid off well.

March 10th, 2019 – Goodman’s Bay Beach, Nassau Bahamas

In school, I took an enterprise class. For this, we were required to create our own business by the end of the year. I partnered with my friend, Anndy, and we decided to create a social business. We both care about the environment so we thought we could create a club where people would unite and clean up beaches on the weekend.

A number of steps occurred for us to create this club but it started as a success. Our first beach clean-up for this was on March 10th. A total number of 11 students attended.