We are happy to announce that since the summer of 2020, a new partnership between Chumbe Island Coral Park and Ozeankind e.V. has been established. Ozeankind is a German NGO that is dedicated to making the world a cleaner place by organizing clean-up events in Zanzibar and other parts of the world.
Their mission statement: Recycling and educational projects for the children of this world.
We are very proud to now kickstart our partnership with Ozeankind through four clean-up events on Chumbe Island that will be held until end of this year. Our plan is to carry out two clean-up events in November and two in December.
Chumbe clean-up team on the west side of the island
As this is the season of short and heavy rainfalls and increased windspeed, we expect that litter from urban centres will be washed into the ocean in higher numbers. For Chumbe and the surrounding areas this means that with particular high tides, litter is washed up at our beautiful beaches from two directions: from Dar es Salaam in the South-West or from Stone Town in the North-East. Considering that Chumbe has a strict no plastics policy in our operations, it breaks our heart to see how marine plastics can reach our remote island paradise.
Hermit crab with a glass house
Depending on weather and prevailing currents, we sometimes find more plastic waste than cute hermit crabs on our beaches. And not only the beaches, also our coral reef ecosystem is impacted by drifting plastic bags, sunken plastic bottles and other plastic debris.
So doing this clean-up event under the partnership and with sponsoring from Ozeankind will help keep the highly protected shores and beaches from Chumbe tidy! So thank you so much to Ozeankind for the support in making this happen!!!
Our plan is to not only collect the marine litter, but to also sort it, weigh it and recycle it with the local recycling companies Zanrec and Chako, with whom we have been working since many years.
On the first day of collecting, November 16th, we collected 37 kg of trash of Chumbe’s shores, the large majority being glass items.
At Chumbe, we are not only going to clean up the litter, we are also interested to research the composition of the waste, by sorting it as detailed as possible, as well as the origin of the collected litter. Wherever possible, we will try to use the barcodes to determine in which country the products were produced. By mapping out the origin of the litter, we expect to get more insights into litter composition, ocean currents and waste aggregation dynamics.
