By Janisha Nathu.
Seeing the litter that ends up along New Zealand’s coastline, and the marine animals that suffer from it can be devastating, but Sustainable Coastlines is working with New Zealanders to turn that around, and to look after the coastlines and waterways we love.
And now people who care about New Zealand’s coastlines and waterways can support that work through The Good Registry.
Through its Love Your Coast programme, Sustainable Coastlines educates schools, workplaces, and individuals about the litter pollution that is affecting our wildlife, ecosystem, and human health. As well as the goal of keeping our coasts and oceans clean, they also focus on our fresh waterways through the Love Your Water programme. These programmes are both informative and hands-on, restoring New Zealand to its natural beauty one tree and piece of plastic at a time.
Through the hard work of volunteers and the team at Sustainable Coastlines, more than 1.5 million litres of rubbish have been collected from our coastlines, and more than 162,000 trees have been planted around New Zealand’s waterways.
Sustainable Coastlines’ Strategic Partnership Director, Stephanie Vercoe says people learn important lessons when they get involved in coastal clean-ups.
“People protect what they love…Once people come out on a beach clean-up, they won’t want to use what they find again.”
For a country that prides itself on being clean and green, we have a bit of work to do to honour this reputation. It’s easy to become overwhelmed, but Stephanie explains it simply as “choosing one thing and then choosing another, just start doing something”.
Each donation made through The Good Registry goes towards educating people on how to keep our coastlines and waterways clean and how to put this knowledge into practice. This includes taking school children out on beach/waterway clean-ups and training citizen scientists for data collection.
With just a $10 donation, the team at Sustainable Coastlines are able to prepare, plant, and maintain a tree, or pick up 30 litres of rubbish from our coastlines!
To hear more about how Sustainable Coastlines is protecting our future, visit the Sustainable Coastlines website. Or if you’d like a simple way to support their work and to help protect our planet, you can do that at The Good Registry.
We have created two simple ways to give and receive the gift of giving and support causes like Sustainable Coastlines:
- Create your own Good Registry for a special event (e.g. a wedding or a birthday) and ask friends to donate to a charity you choose (like Sustainable Coastlines!), instead of buying gifts.
- Give Good Gift Cards instead of traditional gifts, to enable others to make donations to charities they care about.
You can hear from people who have used Good Registries and Good Gift Cards to help charities like Sustainable Coastlines, on our inspirational Giving Wall.
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