Litter Hotspots: Turn off the Tap!
About the Program
Litter, and specifically plastic pollution, is everyone’s problem. Luckily, it is also a problem that you can help solve yourself!
Key Concepts
Over 2 years, the EcoCentre worked with schools and the community in the Yarra catchment area on litter prevention education. We’ve been showing our award-winning documentary ‘Baykeepers’ and playing the song ‘A Little Bit of Litter’, to engage people about littering behaviour. After all, what happens in the ‘burbs, impacts on the Bay… By turning off the litter-tap upstream, we protect our wildlife and ourselves from plastic pollution. The Connies helped us with this, so keep an eye out for them at upcoming local community festivals.
We worked with our amazing community partners Friends of Westgate Park, Beach Patrol and Upper Yarra Landcare, to monitor and collect litter along our waterways and coastline. Between February 2015 and February 2017 over 5,000kg of litter was collected with 250,000 items audited to provide information about litter distribution and composition. Checkout this interactive Matter Out Of Place (MOOP) map to identify Litter Hotspots around Melbourne and to see which litter items dominate at clean-up events.
The Yarra Riverkeeper helped us with river trawls to capture microplastics in the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers. Together, we have collected more than 6,000 microplastics from these waters and are detailing their composition.
Song: "A Little Bit of Litter Really Matters!"
In 2017, we turned our attention to Hip-Hop as a means to spread the message that “A Little Bit of Litter Really Matters!” Local musicians MOOP Patrol, MC Guttermouth and Nicole Joy have recorded a catchy and persuasive tune that will make everyone think twice about littering.
Nurdle Sweep
Our team of EcoCentre marine pollution volunteers are looking into nurdle pollution in our waterways. We collaborated with Tangaroa Blue to implement Operation Clean Sweep, an initiative to reduce nurdle loss at industry level.
Program Film
At the conclusion of the program, Metro Waste and Resource Recovery Group made this beautiful video about the program, directed and filmed by our good friend Michael Lutman (Plasticized, Baykeepers).
Turn Off The Tap was a Litter Hotspots project, funded by the Victorian Government.
