Some important details about beach pollution in Chennai
Posted on: 19/Nov/2019 9:59:52 AM
The residents of Chennai have been facing issues like air pollution and poor quality of tap water in recent times and this has kept the environmentalists very busy. It is important to mention that in Chennai there is another issue that has been attracting the attention now and that is beach pollution.
In the month of September, NCCR or National Centre for Coastal Research organized a coastal clean-up campaign and the volunteers collected 2134 kg of litter from the beaches present in Besant Nagar, Thiruvanmiyur and Kovalam, etc in just 2 hours of time. It was mentioned by the researchers that the plastic disposed of by the beachgoers formed a major portion of the litter.
It must be taken into account that the state of TN had the second most polluted beaches in India with 6804 kg of debris collected from as many as 7 beaches in TN. Cleaning up of as many as 34 beaches in India was conducted by NCCR and as many as 6984 volunteers collected 35 tonnes of waste in just 2 hours.
It was brought out by a scientist of NCCR that litter had plastic cups, bottles, beverage bottles, and food wrappers. It is important to note that plastics left on the beaches might break down to microplastics during the withering process. These microplastics could get into the guts and tissues of fishes and these fishes are finally consumed by humans.
This cleaning up of the beaches is a step towards tracking beach pollution trends and this would help in framing an anti-marine litter policy. This was according to Mr. M. V. Ramana Murthy, director of NCCR. He revealed how it included studying the type and quantity of litter generated on land, quantity going to the coast and washed ashore and its impact on the ecosystem. He then hinted that this activity would be repeated across the coast to collect more data to reveal information about coastal pollution in a quantitative manner.
At the popular Kovalam beach, the volunteers collected a maximum litter of about 1200 kg that included 20% of plastic and paper bags, 1.9% bottle caps, 2.3% plastic spoons, 6.5% food wrappers. Volunteers collected 864 kg of litter from Elliot�s Beach of Besant Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur beach was the cleanest with just 70 kg litter collected from it. It is now said that the study would be pursued in the future also and this was as per the researchers.
