On Sunday the 30th of May we took 80 volunteers from AECOM out to the beautiful Motutapu Island to pick up rubbish from its coastlines. Following our massive event on Aotea/Great Barrier Island earlier this year, AECOM contacted us with a large group of employees wanting to give something back to the islands of the Hauraki Gulf that we all love.

Volunteers spent the day scouring the beaches of this unique island in stunning, cloudless, almost summer-like weather. As we’ve found in similar clean-up events in the past, disposable plastic products made up a large portion of the trash we found. Around half of the total volume of waste collected from this sparsely inhabited island was made up of a selection of the plastic bottles, jandals, bottle caps and cigarette lighters that come from the streets, waterways and boats of metropolitan Auckland on a daily basis. The event was a huge success – the crew managed to remove around 5,000 litres or 350 kg of trash from beaches on both the east and west coasts of the island.

If you’d like to take part in an event like this, just email us at [email protected]