A fantastic and productive Saturday morning at Drury Creek! Early on Saturday 18 March, a motived and caring crew started to arrive at Drury Creek. These included representatives from Auranga Development, the local Iwi, Depsey Wood, Drury School and local community groups.

After signing in at the Sustainable Coastlines event tent, which overlooked the beautiful Drury Creek, we opened the day with a calming Karakia from the local Iwi representative.  This was followed by the Sustainable Coastlines ‘Love Your Coast’ presentation which gives perspective and motivation behind the cleanups we run and emphasised that people often don’t make the connection between dropping rubbish on the street and it eventually ending up in the creek, river, beach, or worse, inside wildlife and into our food chain.  After the health and safety rundown we even got a quick history lesson from Chris of Slippery Creek Kayaks.

At this point our 50 volunteers were ready to go! At 10am the Sustainable Coastlines’ staff members led one team down the to wetland and another highly visible crew went to clean up the Bremner Road berms, under the bridge and onto the muddy banks of Drury Creek at low tide.  They had instruction to search the high tide line where the floating plastics are often stranded in the reeds and native grasses of this beautiful creek.

The groups did amazingly well, picking up more than 4,000 litres of large, small and strange pieces of plastic, building materials and sporting equipment!  The nearby reserve and sports pitches obviously feed a fair amount of footballs and rugby balls into the creek.

After a couple of hours of heads down under the hot Auckland sun, deep in the beautifully nutrient-rich but very deep mud, everyone headed back to base for a well-deserved lunch. The teams were treated to a delicious spread of Mexican food prepared for us by the fantastic Mexicali team. Na’or even serenaded the crew with the steel-drum ‘handpan’ he brought along for the occasion as the kids bounced along in (clean) rubbish-sack races.

We want to send out thanks for to the awesome team from Charles and Rachel from Auranga for their efforts to make this development sustainable, and we look forward to helping plant out this creek as it becomes a park for the new community here to enjoy, the whole world needs caring corporates like these guys and we can’t wait to see them again in the winter!

On Saturday March 18, as part of the wider Love Your Coast Manukau Harbour 2017 clean-up tour, Sustainable Coastlines and Auranga invite you to a fun, family-orientated public cleanup of Drury Creek and the beautiful Ngakoroa Stream.

Auranga is a purpose-built community with a heart, where there will be plenty of places and spaces so people can discover and connect with each other. But building a new community on a greenfields site comes with a responsibility to the natural environment. This is why the partnership between us and Auranga is so important. Auranga is serious about contributing to improved waterways and is including a generous number of parks, reserves, walkways, cycleways, and boardwalks as well as planting tens of thousands of native plants in rain gardens, wetlands and along the banks of stream and estuary waterways.

In keeping with Auranga’s vision, this is a family orientated event where we’ll be organising games with the kids and food and refreshments for all volunteers. The event is open to all, so please extend the invitation to friends and family.