Beach Patrol: how it all began
Beach Patrol Port Melbourne was established in 2010 to help tackle the problem of litter along our foreshore. In 2012, Ramona Headifen and her husband Ross took on leadership roles to help founder and former resident, Tom, manage the group.
Since then, Beach Patrol – along with its sibling organisation, Love Our Streets (LOS), has grown into a large network of more than 40 groups. Together, they form Beach Patrol Australia – a movement that includes 8,000 volunteers located across Victoria and more recently, New South Wales.
Most groups meet monthly for an hour, fostering a strong sense of community while making a tangible impact on local environments.
Cleaner shores through container returns
Since CDS Vic was introduced in 2023, Ramona and fellow volunteers have seen the amount of drink containers on beaches dramatically drop.
“It seems that people are taking their containers with them for a refund,” Ramona said. “And if they are still littering, then someone else is picking it up before we do a cleanup. All of our groups have noticed the change.”
Sometimes volunteers will find old containers with no labels. These can’t go through the Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs), but they can be brought to select depots, like the one in South Melbourne. Here, they’re counted by hand.
Pop it in the bin basket – or help yourself
Along with the scheme, Beach Patrol and LOS have supported our rollout of public place recycling baskets for CDS eligible drink containers.
The 86 baskets allow those who are out and about to deposit their container for another passerby to claim – thereby sharing their 10 cent refund with someone else. This has the added benefit of reducing the amount of recyclable material inside public garbage bins.
Members of Beach Patrol and LOS act as stewards for the baskets by removing wrong items when they see them and then disposing of them correctly. Neither Beach Patrol nor LOS take containers from these public baskets, they leave them for community members to claim.
“The baskets are a great idea. Contamination is still a problem, but thankfully, most things we see in the baskets do belong there,” said Ramona.
She reports however that they do find larger, ineligible containers, like wine bottles and larger milk containers.
“This is why we’re now advocating for the scheme to be expanded to include more items and for the refund amount to be doubled to 20 cents,” she said.
This July, we will install 100 more baskets across the City, including 40 along the foreshore.
Raising funds through the CDS
Since the scheme rolled out in 2023, Beach Patrol Australia have raised nearly $9,000 – representing the return of nearly 90,000 containers.
The volunteer groups have either found the containers as litter items and claimed the refunds themselves, or other people have chosen to donate their 10 cents to Beach Patrol or LOS.
Beach Patrol Australia have used the money to purchase t-shirts for volunteers as well as litter pickers. This has included t-shirts for newly created BP in Maroubra, NSW. T-shirts help to spread awareness of the group to the public and are a useful way to identify those on a clean-up.
Building on their achievements – advocacy and education
Beyond litter clean ups, Beach Patrol and LOS advocate for various waste and litter reduction initiatives.
On top of their support of the CDS, they’re campaigning for beverage containers sold in Australia to have ‘tethered tops’ – lids that are connected to bottles. The goal being to reduce bottle top litter which continues to persist as a problem, despite container litter volumes reducing in recent years.
During their clean ups, Beach Patrol and LOS use an app they developed called Litterstopper to capture what they find. The data collected gets fed into Victoria’s Litterwatch database which supports priority actions in the Victorian Government’s Port Phillip Bay Environmental Management Plan 2017-2027. They’ve been able to use this data to support their advocacy.
Beach Patrol’s message to our community
To reduce the amount of litter on our beaches and in our waterways, Ramona says there’s one simple step we can all take, and that’s to reduce the amount of single use items that we use – notably, single use plastic items.
“It’s not hard to carry a coffee cup or have a reusable water bottle – or even a food container if buying lunch. Avoiding waste in the first place is the best move.”
“Repair where you can. We don’t pay the price of our throwaway items immediately, but as a society, we’re paying the price in the longer term.”
