Thousands of cigarette butts, hundreds of kilograms of takeaway food packaging, and a host of strange and interesting items were removed from Cairns parks and waterways last month as part of Council’s annual Clean Up Cairns events.
More than 200 volunteers took part in 15 community clean-ups throughout Cairns in September, focussing on 16km of the region’s urban creeks and waterways.
This year’s clean-ups also focussed on cigarette litter with 4500 butts collected in under an hour on just three city streets in the inaugural Big Butt Hunt, which launched the month of community clean ups.
Cairns Mayor Bob Manning said 137 bags of litter were collected in 2022, which is equivalent to 34 wheelie bins.
“That is 8,220 litres of litter that volunteers have prevented from ending up in the ocean,” Cr Manning said.
“The obvious benefit of these annual clean ups – particularly in September before our wet season – is that we have removed a large volume of litter from the environment that might have been washed out to the reef with the wet season rains.
“Other benefits to the clean-ups are that they help us to collect data and information about littering.”
At a single clean-up site in Brinsmead, volunteers sorted through more than 100 kilograms of rubbish, and added their litter audit data to Tangaroa Blue’s Australian Marine Debris Initiative.
Land and Sea ranger groups also assisted with this year’s clean-ups, providing much needed support to reach litter in locations and waterways that community volunteers couldn’t access.
