Volunteers

A small part of our collection

We had around 40 volunteers on the day, with a mixture of ages people who love living and visiting this area and want to make sure that anyone else who may stumble across Latchi and the Akamas on their travels sees the beauty that we all do and not just the rubbish that is polluting the land and oceans.

So after meeting at 10am at the Latchi Watersports Centre HQ, preparing ourselves to leave for 10.30am we split into our 4 groups.

Everyone was given some bags and disposable gloves, donated by both Polis and Neo Chorio Municipalities and we also gave everyone a bottle of water to keep hydrated.

Our team were prepared with extra water, bags, gloves and of course first aid kits and the determination to make this another successful cleanup…

• • Group 1 lead by Hannah and Ash, took the Latchi Harbour side heading towards La plage beach and Polis Campsite.
  • Group 2 lead by Kati took the road side from Latchi heading towards La Plage and Prodromi.
  • Group 3 was lead by Cara and James who took there group from Latchi heading towards Neo Chorio and cleaned both the beach and roadside.
  • Melissa and Mark were the leaders for group 4 and they took a drive to the beach area by the Anassa Hotel, just so we could cover as much of the local area as we could.

It was a windy day and sometimes we even struggled to get some the rubbish in the bags with out it blowing away again, the sun did shine and many of us who came in layers had to start to remove them once we got started collecting rubbish is hard work you know!!

Even though storm Phillipos was against us for sea conditions, you could say he helped us out with washing up a lot of rubbish onto the beaches.

It was not long before we were leaving bags full of rubbish on the side of the road, for our team and some of the volunteers with trucks to collect once we had finished.  As always we are blown away by how much rubbish we can find, one lady could not believe that she alone found 12 face masks in just a small area of the beach (approx 850m).

There was a mixture of things found a large amount of plastic bottles, metal, rope, tyres, inflatables, clothes, hats, shoes along with glass and paper, cardboard I think if you name it we found it.

After around 1 and a half hours we started to head back to the harbour to look at our wears and I dont think that any of us were prepared for the amount that we had found in such a short time I would say that there was around 40 to 50 bags of general rubbish along with the large number of items, plastic sun loungers, metal poles, plastic tubing and sheets of rusty metal, when we had separated everything to take to the local recycling centre we will filled three trucks and a trailer.

It is so heartbreaking that every time we do a cleanup we seem to find more and more, but we are proud and humbled that when we arrange them so many people want to help us. This gratitude was also shown to one of our groups by the staff and owners of the Souli Hotel who came out to offer a free coffee as their thanks to helping to keep the local area clean.

We would like to thank everyone who volunteered, we know there were a few people who could not make it on the day, do not worry we will have another beach clean up again later in the year and we hope to see you then.

As we have done for a number of years now, we will reward any of our customers who bring back their trash and give it to us with a discount voucher off their next visit, as we hope that this is just a little incentive to not leave it in the Blue Lagoon or any of the other bays along the Akamas Coastline.

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Thank you! Everyone.