Pulling shopping trolleys out of creeks is all in a day's work for Bellambi local Dilys Hoser and her crew at Corrimal Rotary Environment Group (CREG).
“We go into the bushes and find lounges, campsites, trolleys… everything. It all gets reported to council,” Dilys says.
“We’ve pulled shopping trolleys out of creeks. We’ve had to lift and manoeuvre three lounges out of a small gully.”
The winner of the Rise and Shine Basil Ryan Award at Wollongong Council's Environment Volunteer Awards in December, Dilys leads a CREG environmental clean-up every Thursday, and on the first and third Saturdays of each month. And not just in Corrimal – their clean-ups cover locations from Lake Illawarra to Bulli.
Rotary Corrimal more broadly works to support causes such as food hamper charity True Hearts Community (Warilla), charity ShelterBox, and local education program for disadvantaged kids, the Illawarra Imagination Library.
“We get a lot of international students from the uni coming along to the clean-ups, because one of the other things rotary does is we have Illawarra Friends of International Students, and that is an English conversation group,” Dilys says.
“That group isn’t running at the moment, because UOW has had so many changes going on, but the students are setting up a club in the meantime to talk and practise English together.”
Helping put microplastics on the map
CREG also completes a microplastics survey during beach clean-ups. Australian Microplastic Assessment Project (AUSMAP) provides a framework for community groups to evaluate the presence of microplastics in their environment.
“You record everything, the different colours and shapes of the plastics, send the sample and survey off to AUSMAP, and the idea is that they have a map of Australia on their website, and they plot all the different surveys on the map depending on the density of plastics found,” Dilys says.
Unexpected benefit of Covid
CREG won the Rise & Shine Basil Ryan Award for the first time back in 2020.
“When we started off, we were doing clean-ups just once a month. But during Covid, it was a way we could all meet outside, so we started doing the first and third Saturdays of the month, then every Thursday, so we ended up with six clean-ups a month,” Dilys says.
Dilys thanks Corrimal Rotary and CREG for their support in carrying out regular clean-ups.
“I feel honoured, but guilty! It’s really a team effort. I do a lot of organising, filling in forms and making assessments. It takes a lot of my time, but everyone in the group works hard,” she says.
Rise & Shine is Wollongong City’s longest-running environmental clean-up program, established in 1986.
“Corrimal Beach is pretty rubbish-free," Dilys says. "In other places, we are seeing a bit less litter but if it comes in on the tide, it's going to come in on the tide regardless. If it comes down the creek, it depends on the businesses that back onto the creek. If they don’t do the right things, we still get the rubbish.
“Bellambi is always messy, it doesn’t matter how many times we go back. Bellambi has a lot of wind, the schools might not have good enough bins. There’s many factors. Some places are getting better, some not so much.
“The council provides big white bags, pickers and gloves. We often wear gum boots, depending on where we are going. It can get quite sloshy at Puckey’s Estate, for example.”
'Plastic never goes away'
Dilys says the best thing people can do to support the environment is manage your rubbish, recycle as much as possible and reuse what you can.
“I suppose the best thing you can do is not buy anything in plastic. Because the plastic never goes away. Plastic breaks down and goes from a piece of plastic to a macro plastic, to a microplastic, to a nano plastic, but it’s still in the environment,” she says.
“Buy things in glass jars, get your vegetables in string bags, just cut out plastics all together. All my scraps go to my worm farm or my composter.”
Anyone can come along to CREG clean-ups. Contact Dilys on creg@corrimalrotary.org.au and keep up to date with Corrimal Rotary’s calendar.
