Heidi Tait - CEO Tangaroa Blue Foundation. Founder Australian Marine Debris Initiative. | EP 33

welcome to our epic ocean where critical solutions to a planet in peril are brought to the surface our epic ocean celebrates all that is epic about the ocean and why it is the planet's most vital resource and now to our host rich german in maori and polynesian mythology tongaroa is the god of the ocean tangaroa made laws to protect the ocean and its sea creatures the essential mantra being if you look after me then i will look after you as we are all well aware and as ocean explorer jack cousteau famously sounded the alarm in 1971 to the united nations our ocean is in trouble and we need to raise awareness globally to protect it from further harm while some ocean related problems are better addressed through international treaties solutions to marine and coastal issues vary greatly and are often best addressed at a regional level these include land-based sources of marine pollution and coastal degradation as well as unsustainable fishing practices overpopulation and development it's important for us to understand better at a local level what can be done and what is being accomplished by organizations and individuals doing the best work which can be replicated and scaled to communities worldwide my guest today is focused on solutions to this big challenge this is why we decided to get to know and share the work of heidi tate the tangaroa blue foundation co-founder an australian not-for-profit dedicated to the removal and prevention of marine debris heidi's love for the ocean comes from 20 years as a scuba diving instructor in 2004 she co-founded tongariro blue and the australian marine debris initiative as a way of not only removing the ever-increasing loads of trash in her ocean but more importantly finding ways to prevent debris from being released in the first place she was named one of the 18 most influential women in ocean conservation by ocean geographic and her mantra is if all we do is clean up that is all we'll ever do from way down under in australia heidi tate welcome to our epic ocean how are you today uh doing very well a bit rainy but um we're happy to be indoors today actually well it's a sunny day here in laguna beach so don't be too jealous so i want to start big picture uh excited to dive into this conversation with you first question why do we have so much marine debris where is it all coming from i know and it's only getting worse um look i guess there's two big things right the population of the world keeps getting bigger and we keep using and disposing of more stuff so um a percentage even if the percentage remains the same it's going to result in a greater volume escaping out of our waste systems or our inadequate waste systems um into the environment and a lot of that will end up in the marine environment for sure so how did this become such a focus of yours in other words why do you care so much i guess even as a kid i used to spend a lot of time in national parks our parents used to take us there all the time um for school holidays so i always had a really strong connection with nature um i remember being really young as a kid and feeling that energy when you get to some of those really beautiful places in the world where you just feel like really good energy and so i felt that connection at a very young age i spent a lot of time you know traveling around the world in my 20s and my 30s and became a diving instructor and through that just started to see more and more rubbish you know in the ocean where i was living and working and playing and the concern started getting bigger when you started to see that impact on our wildlife and then living in in western australia just um seeing the variety of rubbish in a really remote location like there's not just one thing and the question was where's it coming from why is it here and more importantly how do we stop it and just felt that it wasn't on the radar back then you know people weren't really talking about it as they are now so wanted to make some noise about it beautiful so you just felt compelled like to do something because you didn't see enough other people maybe taking action we're going to talk a lot about action in this conversation speaking of australian marine debris initiative i believe he called amd is a national network of volunteers partners government agencies and industry bodies focused on the removal and prevention of marine debris the amd database is one of the largest and oldest marine debris databases in the world why did you create amd um when i looked at all this rubbish that was on the beach um in western australia in a national park and saw the wide variety of sources um it became really clear that there wasn't one solution that was going to be available to solve the problem because they're all coming from from different places for different reasons and when i started talking about marine debris actually people started asking me why i had a problem with driftwood and that's what they thought marine debris meant back then so you know that awareness and education on the issue was was very very low and when we started to really think about the wide variety of stakeholders that you would need to solve the problem because of the sources being so varied the first thing we needed was evidence otherwise we'd be a group of people staying on a beach saying hey there's all this rubbish on the beach do something about it so the evidence enabled us to really look at um what was impacting different areas of coastline because what we see you know in very remote cape york australia in the very very tip of australia is completely different to what we would see on beaches around our cities in melbourne um and sydney for example and so that evidence we hoped would be able to drive um investment and focus um and engage the right stakeholders to be able to address those specific issues and and so the database was the evidence and we needed we needed evidence we needed the starting point we still do um and not only now do we need that evidence to be able to inform policy but we also need that evidence to monitor the changes that are being implemented to make sure that the bin that was put at a location to stop litter escaping into the environment actually has that the outcome that we were trying to achieve in the first place got it and the database that you created i believe can be used on local and also international government levels and also really on that community level can you explain that yeah so the methodology around the data collection was always around identifying the source and so you can't you can't combine too many things in a category if you want to identify a source because it's too broad then so the database has around 140 categories um and that really enables us to identify exactly what is uh occurring on a beach um to help us to track back to the the source um and so the way that that was developed means that you can take data and you can say okay well this is what's impacting my local beach let's have a look at what's a local uh liver input versus an offshore ocean current issue so that's kind of like the first split because a very small community might have a very difficult time in trying to address um waste originating from another country because it's come there from an ocean current but they can definitely do something about their local litter so we want them to be able to understand you know what we call it is um a land c source index so roughly what percentage are we dealing with as local litter versus what's offshore sources and then exactly you know what those items are and what material that they are the point of the whole of the database with that tracking is to understand the exact point of loss at what point does that item become litter or escape into the environment and therefore what needs to change at that point of loss to prevent that in the future got it and it appears that you've created a model that is conducive to partnership and collaboration adding more boots on the ground to reinforce your mission can you explain the long-term goals and really what i want to know is what is your model for replication and scaling so that we can really maximize the impact yeah i guess one of the biggest issues that we keep hearing about at international scale is databases that can't talk to each other you know you've got so many people starting new projects and new databases for the purpose of their own project without actually understanding how that can be used in different scales or in different contexts so you know one of the goals was to try and get everybody to start collecting data the same way and it started at a very local level but you know a lot of people understood the value of this and it scaled to become a national program and now we even have countries um in our region using our methodology and our database which really helps explain that regional story of marine debris all that that signature so um i i guess when we look at something we want a model to be um usable or data to be usable at that local scale but when we look at um different debris items the point of what they should be intercepted at can be very very different and so you want you want all the stakeholders to be able to input it there at the right level so in some cases you know an item should be dealt with at a local a local government level some things should be done at a state level or national legislation or something should be done across an industry through industry bodies or at an international scale and so finding out at what point each of these items should be intercepted at enabling them the right stakeholder groups to come in you know is this industry best practice is it legislation that needs to be changed is it just education and awareness on how people use something or dispose of something you know there's not one single solution so you really need that granular level of data to be able to help inform those different changes and those practices sounds like it sounds like it's all of the above right yeah i i think you're bringing up a great point um one of the things i've noticed i have my own non-profit and as i really dove into this world i just observed so many wonderful people passionate people about all these different issues and yet with a lot of nonprofits they're all kind of working separately i think sometimes out of fear that if i work with you you're going to take my donors or something like that so it feels like a complex problem for you to say hey if we all just use this same software the same model and really work together we could make a much bigger impact um am i am i right and is that is that a hard thing to accomplish oh yeah absolutely nailed it on the head you know i often say and it's a horrible way to explain it but the conservation sector really doesn't have an overarching body to look after the sector like a lot of other industries do um the funding that goes into the sector is so small and you know a lot of the time you've got these organizations that are really just you know fighting each other for these scraps of funding to be able to exist um and the protection around existing means that there's there can be a lot of distrust in collaborating together so what we you know what we wanted to say is that you know we're all here for the the goal of the same reason of trying to prevent you know the stuff into our oceans if tangaroa blue is able to host a platform that enables you know a lot of the other other organizations to be more effective in their work because they don't have to fund this platform themselves then you know that can be our role so we sort we kind of see that tangora blue is also another partner in the andy just like everybody else is and they're not giving anything to us they're using a platform that was built for that purpose and but but it still is an issue you know and that's why we keep getting these new databases and projects popping up instead of people collaborating and actually researching what's already been done right you know the the amount of emails i get all the time if there's someone that's had this brainwave um that wants me to give them advice on it and i'm like well just do a bit of research of what's already been done in the last 20 years because you'll you'll learn what didn't work and why um instead of just starting from scratch again yeah 100 so you mentioned stakeholders and we've talked about partnership obviously you can't do this alone i'm curious who's on your team who are these other stakeholders members partners and what volunteers are involved in your work so we we started you know really really small we started with me and then we started with me and a local volunteer who took all my excel data sheets to create the database you know and it slowly grew from there and people understood what we were trying um to achieve and we had some good um good case studies of how data was used to influence change and and so people kind of understood and i think that you know getting volunteer retention and getting partner retention is about them understanding that they're part of a solution and particularly in this space you know people go to the beach every week every month and they go and collect more rubbish and they do that for 10 years eventually they get very despondent they feel like that they're rubbish collectors but if they collect the rubbish they collect the data a source reduction project is put in place to address one of those items that they find and then they see in the future that there's less of that item because whatever source reduction project was implemented actually had an effect they're not a rubbish collector anymore you know they're part of the solution they're a citizen scientist and they're providing critical ongoing data to be able to manage and tweak and implement and monitor these strategies so um you know at the moment we're very lucky we were successful in a five-year government tender back in the end of 2018 and the australian government had never put five years of funding on the table for this issue before but it enabled us to be you know very focused and have confidence in what we're able to deliver and have funding for now this particular project was across the great barrier reef and and it runs through to um june next year but that's enabled us to upscale and really update a lot of our um resources our database now app is actually going through a massive upgrade at the moment so you know that security and funding has enabled us to grow and we have a staff of about 30 at the moment that are spread all over the country so we do a lot of zoom meetings we have about 2 000 partner organizations that contribute at the moment to the database um yeah and i mean if you look at the stats of what the amd database has been able to achieve i think we're around 27 000 cleanups um you know there's there's almost 200 000 um volunteering opportunities and equates to something like 25 million dollars of volunteer hours of what people want to contribute to this issue but they want to see them being part of a solution and not just picking up rubbish okay so let's let's take a little time out and acknowledge heidi you were one and i think this is a good teaching point for for maybe even one person out there listening that wants to make a difference you had an idea you know you saw a problem didn't see it being worked on enough and you said i'm going to do something about it you are a one woman operation that now has 30 people on your internal team did you say 2 000 partners around australia and now you have federal government funding am i hearing all that correctly yeah i would never have even thought um you know that that day on that beach of you know starting this idea would we would be where we are now but um you know i've surrounded myself with passionate people that that wanna that want to be involved in this um you know my team are all so passionate um and they're excited because we're pushing boundaries you know where we're really i feel that you know sometimes you can be a bit despondent because it takes so long to get change to happen you know but it's um i keep telling them all the time you guys are pushing boundaries we're making people think about the way they do things um and and those changes do take time but they do happen um and that's what i'm most excited about is is being really influential in that space i love this so let's dive into your background a little like you're my understanding and you'll tell us now that your background as is as a scientist and scientists aren't typically or necessarily taught to be leaders of organization so what is your background as a scientist and was there a transition that had to occur that you just stepped into this role of also being not just scientists but leader of organization well look i would say i'm a citizen scientist i i haven't been to university to be a scientist i am um i'm somebody that um you know went to university for six months and decided this wasn't for me i want to go travel the world and i was very lucky back then that i was able to just jump on a plane and go wherever i wanted um you know i was actually a uh a snowboarding person for a while i lived in austria for a while i lived in thailand for a while i became a dive instructor i experienced the world and i also saw the impact that humans have on the world and my connection to nature made me always conscious of that and my footprint as i was going around the place but look i think that i'm a logical person i've always been a very logical problem kind of solving person um and and that's what's driven me and i've surrounded myself with experts so you know i have scientists on a team i have experts in a whole variety of different fields on my team i have government partners on my team and i have a gut instinct that's gone so it's gone pretty well so far so um you know i utilize that framework and i think that you know some of my board members in the past have kind of described me as a hub or a catalyst and that's what i am i bring i bring the stakeholders and the people together that need to be together and try and facilitate that into a solution and that's what i've been really good at and that's what i love doing excellent so you're just you're a natural leader to be able to do that which is a critical uh skill to have um i gotta ask i wanna dive a little into your background as an ocean lover um how did your passion for the ocean begin was there an aha moment as a little girl on the beach or was it when you started scuba diving how did that passion start yeah i mean the ocean for me was another natural environment that i connected to really a lot i mean as a kid i wanted to be a ranger um i kind of feel like i've created my own organization to be my own type of ranger now but you know one of my earliest memories as a really little girl is i used to live close to the beach and um they have a an ocean swimming pool um and i remember standing on the edge of this ocean swimming pool when i must have been about three or four doing swimming lessons in the pouring rain and my mother kind of hiding underneath the ledge of the the toilet block trying to stay out of the rain and learning to actually swim in one of these ocean swimming pools that are you know and and just love being in the salt water um you know living in thailand that's always an eye opener i used to come back from a dive with plastic stuffed into every part of my wetsuit in my pocket that i that i could that i would pick up on the way through um you know so i've always been part of that clean up you know framework whenever there was that kind of opportunity i just felt that that that's such a short-term solution because we know that the next tide will bring more stuff in you know the next group of people on a beach will leave more litter so it has a very short-term impact and while it has an immediate um you know improvement of the environment um it will always be replaced so i guess i got frustrated with that to say what actually needs to happen so that we don't have to keep picking up other people's rubbish i hear you yeah we do ocean cleanups here and i feel like it's a and we'll talk more about this but i feel like it's it's so people feel like they're taking some action but you and i know it's just you go back in the water you know they go do the cleanup yay and then they might go home and people like you and i are back in the ocean tomorrow and guess what's there more trash so um it's frustrating which is why i want to definitely spend time in this conversation talking about how do we stop it um let's go back to the database for a minute though and i hope this i hope this next question is taken the right way um sometimes i feel that we can focus so much on data and the analysis of it uh some call it science for the sake of science and that it stops us from taking action when it comes to issues like marine pollution so i guess heidi i want you to prove me wrong why is data collection so important in in the case of your work i guess to get people to implement a source reduction you know plan at whatever scale that is they need they need the reason you know why why should i care why should i change why should i make action why should i spend money whatever that reason is it's the why and so you know the data is is one of those um those things that that you need to put on the table um to get that movement happening it can't work on its own and i i agree i have um a lot of frustration around data sets that get collected a certain way for a certain project and then the project finishes the report comes out and and then both of those things actually just get cobwebs on a shelf somewhere so we wanted to create a platform that was really user-friendly and and had practical application at that scalable model so it could be used locally but at a national level as well an international level as well and so um we wanted people to understand how to use data themselves and not having to rely on it being used by a university or a government agency that they could be the ones that presented their case in a way that was understandable and provided the evidence that was needed um to make it an issue locally and so i guess that that's you know that's a tool in itself it's how to collect it as a as a skill but how to use it is a skill and when we look at that amd network and and the framework of andy it has so many different parts of it and in my own my thoughts is that they all have to happen together if we're going to solve this issue so cleanups is a starting point yes immediate removal short-term health improvement but the the opportunity to collect data the data if it's done in a consistent way at a large scale then you have that opportunity to use it and then how is it you so you want the community to know how to use it you want the government to know how to use it and that exists and that has credibility and then you want it to be used um in a way that can be measured as well you know so many people go oh there's so much rubbish here there's no bins we should have put a bin there nobody knows it's at the right bin whether people will use it whether it is being used whether it's in actually the right location that part of it very it gets missed a lot and by making people measure change and having that data then you can really show are we having the impact that we want so i think that it's those skills that the community need in not just collecting data but using data that gives it its greatest value okay good thank you for that answer because i i was a little worried it might offend you as someone who's all about collecting data but your statement about how you didn't want just you don't want to collect data and then it just sits on the shelf and gathers doubts that it's turning that data into action so i i appreciate that answer um tangent question i think i saw this on your website how does your work tie into the un sustainability development goals um so we're excited when there's a marine debris target um in the sustainability goals under under 14. um i guess in australia we we we've been included in the australian government's report on how they're meeting the sustainable development goals although there is a big disconnect in australia on on how that happens it's almost like they go and have a look at who's doing what and go oh yeah we'll claim that as part of what's happening in australia you know they're funding um our program along the great barrier reef which is great um you know our question to the government there is uh the funding finishes in 2023 we know of course that marine debris will still exist so to ensure that that wasn't a complete waste of time what's going to happen next um you know so that's that's a question that we're doing but i guess it's about providing a case study on how we've been able to establish this in australia at a citizen science level that has now input from the government so it wasn't designed by the government and then given to the citizen scientists it was done the other way so we we have the power to have to make action whenever we want you don't have to wait for it to to be a political issue or have political funding you can just do it whenever you want and this is a framework that you can adapt and you can utilize um to get out there and and i think that that enables a scalable model to help other communities and other countries um to also contribute to the sustainable development goals but i i think one of the things that you know a lot of times people think tango royal blue is a clean up organization and and you know we very much try to say we're not you know that's part of what we do and it's a very public facing part of what we do but we do so much in the background and in some cases we work with industry partners to get an awesome solution and we can't actually shout it to the roof from the rooftops because um that would um that would put a risk on the partnership so so we've been able to get some really good solutions that that maybe are done behind the scenes um and that's you know that that's i guess also the model is how do you work with the different sectors um and sometimes they're not all forward-facing and and those kind of models can be used in in any country because you're just identifying the rates right stakeholders that you need at the table to get the right solution and you're giving away to measure that as well so we hope that this model can be used more broadly very good and it it feels like you have the right um mindset to be happy with work getting done that's not forward-facing that's making a difference like there's not a lot of ego in you that's like look at look at us and how great we are you you truly care about the problem and solution so uh i want to acknowledge you for that let's uh i want to shift gears just a little bit uh during the insanely fun and iconic byron blues fest 2019 you teamed up with refill for an intimate beach cleanup with some pretty cool friends like jack johnson lucas nelson and dirk girl to help launch the global byo bottle campaign how did that come about yeah that was exciting um so jack's been one of our ambassadors now since i think um 2010 i've actually been on each of his australian tours since since 2010 and and i actually did quite a lot of diving in hawaii um over the years too so um i know his kokua foundation um so we have a really good relationship with jack and the foundation and um when we uh teamed up with another amd partner who's we refill they provided these amazing water refill stations um i think they did like 80 festivals in 2018 2019 before the whole covert thing here um and their machines are designed um to use tap water so they they're not using spring water and you can refill um sparkling and coal and filtered water so you know you're giving that cold water which people really want it's not a bubbler anymore and so this was a great way to launch the byo bottle um campaign and as part of that we wanted to do a clean up and and really connect those things right so it's about what's in our environment what the data is to do the collection where did it come from and how do we translate that into everyone's day-to-day lives in reducing their use of this material which is just you know everywhere in our environment and so it's trying to put those pieces together so we refill provided what we would call a source reduction project and that is reducing single-use water bottles at events um that particular event at blues fest reduced 24 000 single use water bottles back of house so every single stage had one of their units um on every single stage for the artists for the crew for all the admin staff for the volunteers and then there was a couple of um stations out the front as well for front of house for the for the visitors and the patrons that came to that event too so it was to show what is possible if everybody wants to work together now one thing that comes out of that which is a really interesting concept because a lot of people are talking about like let's go water bottle free great concept but nobody really thinks about the impact outside of the environmental impact and so one of the frames works that came out of we refill was about shifting single-use plastic economy you can't take away a product that provides someone with a revenue and replace it with nothing because then it's not going to be a long-term solution so the we refill model was about shifting the economy so nobody losed except the only person that lost was the beverage company which is fine because we don't want their single use water bottles anyway so it was a it was a way to um make sure that the revenue wasn't the thing that was going to the whole thing was going to hinge on um and that's why it was such a massive success and so it was great to be able to celebrate that with the cleanup as well very cool when's the next byron blues fest going to happen uh easter they just they just ran one in easter very scaled back uh model unfortunately we've had some pretty major flooding um here as well so um that was a bit of an issue and and covert as well so it wasn't what it used to be um but they are looking to to kind of redevelop that moving forward nice and i didn't realize you knew jack johnson since would you say 2010 yeah yeah have you had recent communication and i know he's supported you and he's uh you know promoted you on social media and whatnot but are you still in communication and doing cool stuff together yeah we do um through the johnson hawhana foundation and they give us uh one of their mini grants every year that we can do some education stuff and school stuff so we we do have a really good ongoing and long-term communication with those guys that big aloha to them if they're listening for sure oh that's awesome very cool so i want to hear about your ambassadors uh it seems like you have seasoned veterans of the environmental movements representing your interests but also have several very young passionate wildlife and ocean stewards let's hear about them yeah our ambassadors kind of organically came about that that program and those people and it was because they were already doing amazing work in the environment they were already contributing data to the database they were already part of that amd network um and they went out of their way to teach others and to engage others and so that's how why we invited those those guys to be ambassadors so we have bernadette um also known as fleet and uh and flea is actually works for a local council down in in the southern area of new south wales um and has spent um a lot of her time working developing a local marine debris working group and training all these people and she had this great program where um people had to be trained in how to collect data at their local beach and they had to actually submit a data set and then they were able to have one of their pre-loved t-shirts screen printed to say they were part of the group now so there was this reward for going through that process um and then some of our younger kids they're just you know i used to i used to love going and talking to schools and stuff when i was a lot a lot younger they don't necessarily want to listen to an old lady anymore so these young young kids you know they get in there and they can talk to their peers and they're so passionate and they love it and so we love working with the next generation you know we need we need that passion and and not the um the lack of hope you know about what's happening to our environment our climate um our oceans we we don't want people to be in such despair as they go through to feel like there's no point in doing anything so these young kids they just they ooze hope and passion and they don't have the fear of failure you know they we can fix this and i'm going to show you how and so we just love their energy and we love working and supporting those guys as well that's got to keep you inspired and it sounds like um they just yeah it sounds like they kind of get it right maybe a level that our generation doesn't or maybe doesn't even want to to look at right yeah and they've been part of source reduction projects themselves so they've seen the success you know um elijah one of the young ambassadors he was doing one of our great barrier reef cleanups and and along the river he found this pipe that was popping out of the the rock wall and had all these tiny little um plastic they were bio filters and he was actually able to um we were able to track these biofilters back to a seafood shop um that was up the road and these biofilters had been escaping out of their their wet tanks um and the guy didn't even know and so he was able to work with that local business to find a solution and then say hey i've been part of the solution so um you know again it's not just about them doing cleanups and being able to do the data but it's being able to use that data for their own communities and show how those successes can happen that's amazing i i heard you say somewhere that um you don't believe in naming and shaming and i am a hundred percent with you on that uh sometimes i think activists are counterproductive when they make offenders wrong for what they're doing and personally i don't ever call myself an activist i i prefer the word conservationist so i'm curious your thoughts on that yeah i mean i i think that um sometimes the activists go to the name and shame um as the first point of contact and and that's that's where i think the the problem is i think that it it's also it is an option but it's always going to be my last option if nothing else is going to work then eventually you're going to have to call somebody out publicly so um i think that um we we need to be not only naming and shaming but we also be um you know naming and feigning so we need to give the good stories out there as well and that's really really important otherwise it's always just bad news um and and so i think that providing the opportunity for um different industry groups and businesses and governments to be part of telling the success stories is really is really really important and how those collaborations have reached that that point and you know we've been part of some programs with businesses and industries that conservationists i guess technically or traditionally wouldn't really work with but we found common ground we've had a solution or we've had a project that we we want to both see achieve and and that's provided a platform and that platform has enabled us to also build some trust um that we can have some more difficult conversations moving forward as as well and so you know that's that's really important um we can't you know we can't make the conservation sector feel like they have to solve everything you know they can be the catalyst but they need to have all the stakeholders at the table to make the changes that we can't do all of that on our own and providing a platform that's negative isn't going to enable those conversations to happen i love it name and fame versus name and shame and you're 100 right if if you know ultimately to create the solution you want that you need to be working with these companies that you and i both know are probably doing bad things if we just go to them and say you're bad you're bad you're bad they're not going to want to sit down and talk to you it's it's kind of common sense so i'm glad that that's your um way of operating and i'm 100 with you on that one let's let's i would just add one more thing to that if i can and the thing is that it's not just about like what working together means is not you know we don't receive money or checks from from companies that don't align with our values and without our goals um you know that's a very different thing to being able to work together on a project that has has an outcome um and and i think that that's really important i think that at the moment the green washing that's happening in the sector is is really concerning and we've got marketing companies and big companies that think that making a change and having green credentials is just giving somebody a check and that's not what we do we only work with organizations that we can influence and see something um you know happen that's better otherwise you know that it's kind of off the table so we do have a criteria of who we're going to work with but the way we work with them is in a collaborative model excellent thank you for for clarifying that um let's go back to marine debris what are the biggest sources that you are seeing and you kind of touched on this before tell us how it varies from place to place yes so when we go to cape york and we work with our major amazing indigenous ranger teams that are up in in remote australia um you know these communities a thousand kilometers away from the nearest city um they have very small communities and they have massive country to manage um and when you go to the coastlines along there um you can see some of the most impacted coastline in australia um in respect to marine debris and 99 of that stuff is coming from offshore sources so we have you know cargo ships we have international commercial fisheries we have um marine debris entering from different areas um uh and and then coming through on ocean currents um the majority 90 plus will be plastics um a lot of it will be the some kind of containers or fishing gear um and the biggest problem of course is that it continually fragments and breaks up so you know the majority of it is in the process of breaking up into a smaller piece which makes it you know so hard to remove if you can possibly remove it and of course the big issue with the remote communities so what do you do with it once you've removed it from the beach because there's no curbside recycling system that's there so it's a really challenging environment and and the majority of it is coming from offshore whereas if we go to a beach around one of our urban areas or one of our cities we know that the majority of it's coming from the catchment it's litter items it's cigarette butts it's food packaging it's those single use items that might get used once for five seconds and then disposed of um and a lot of it's un unnecessary stuff as well but if we just thought about materials and packaging that we wouldn't actually need him in the first place so um you know but the majority again is plastic so we know plastic is the number one problem regardless of where we go it's just the source that will change depending on how far away you are from a city or an urban area makes sense and we'll we'll talk about cigarette butts and also micro plastics what's the most dangerous thing that you find oh um well actually one of our team had one on the weekend um back in 2012 we started finding these things we call them silver canisters they're like a silver metal um container with a yellow bun lid and they started washing up in in weird places back in 2012 and we still get the odd one washing up which we we picked one up um on the weekend and they're actually full of pellets that are fumigants for the cargo ships or silos where there's grain so they kill rodents and whether a container of them was lost or a box of them was lost um they keep re-emerging the problem is is that they can be fatal to inhale or ingest and the container themselves has no warning label on it or any label on it whatsoever and it looks like a really cool bottle so people kind of pick it up and go that's you know that's cool i'll wash that out and use it for whatever um without knowing how um potentially fatal it can be so um yeah one of the team had one of them pop up at a cleanup that we actually did last weekend holy cow my guess would have been that you would have said ghost nets would be the dangerous thing you're finding out they're not silver canisters but you mentioned fishing nets you must be finding a lot of disregarded fishing gear that's obviously not good for anything yeah we do in certain areas um the gulf of carpentaria for example um is an area that ocean currents come from the arafura sea um there used to be a lot of unregulated fishing happening in there and the ghost nets uh were getting all fishing nets were being either lost or run over by other boats um and the ghost nets that the rangers were finding up there they could get you know 250 plus a year um and we know that you know they just continually kill wildlife um when they they impact so i guess one of the bigger problem is that we still find ghost nets we're not finding them in as massive numbers as we we were you know maybe five six ten years ago um which is good news but uh the response to a ghost net when it's in a remote location is the problem um someone finds that they report it it could take two weeks for someone to go and get it and by that stage where's it gone um and so you know it takes it takes time um to be able to address those things and and a lot of them then get lost in the process that's a tough one what's uh what's the craziest or most interesting interesting thing that you've found while collecting trash we find weird stuff we find interesting i mean you never know we had a we actually had a little sports camera that got found um last year on one of our island cleanups that we were able to plug in and charge up and and we actually found the owner of it who was in new zealand who had lost it um several years years before it kind of went a bit viral um over social media everyone's because it had the picture of this guy it was like you could see him clearly yeah and so we were able to find him on social media that was kind of fun um we had a water bottle or a glass bottle that washed up in one of our remote um communities with a letter in it that was written in indonesian and we were able to get it translated and it was a letter from a young girl in indonesia and it was a letter to a hollywood movie star and she had been writing this letter to this movie star for his birthday and um she didn't have the money to buy a postage stamp so she put this letter into this bottle and thrown at the ocean with a hope that um it would reach this this bollywood actor uh for his birthday and how much that she was in love with him um you know did you get the letter in here [Laughter] no we were still trying we weren't able to weren't able to reach him but you know we just thought that that that's hard and and then just the weird things you know like false teeth or you know um yeah just weird items anything that you could probably list we found it at least once i'm pretty sure i saw a breast implant somewhere and and doing some homework on you is that right yeah i no idea i don't even want to think about how that goes i'm not sure how that got there oh gosh that's fun um good times right so let's let's go back to beach cleanups i've always felt like and we talked about this a little like they're okay they allow people to take some action but obviously we need to stop the flood of plastics into the ocean so please share what can be done what are you guys doing about this yeah i guess one of the most ironic things that i see is people rock up to a clean up with a single water bottle or a single use takeaway coffee cup and you're just like it that's the thing right how do you connect this with this um and a cleanup is a really good way of doing that because people then understand um that every piece of rubbish that they pick pick up has a story right it's come from somewhere it's passed through somebody's hand and then it creates some kind of tangible connection to the stuff that passes through everybody's hands and where that might end up so i think that that's a really important um not just the cleanup and the removal but it provides a really good education opportunity as well and the amount of times that i've heard people go into a clean up at a beach that they considered clean and and say at the end of the cleanup wow i can't believe how much we found you know it means that you've opened people's eyes to something that they weren't seeing before and you can never close your eyes once you've opened them to something so that you know it's it's what we call state of knowledge right we've increased their state of knowledge and you can never go backwards so you can only go forward so it can be a real starting point um and and then it's about you know identifying what people use in their in their day-to-day life you know there's been a social media post where they say oh it's only one straw says eight billion people that's the kind of thing you know it's that ongoing trickle effect that accumulates rather than the one-off mass spill kind of thing um and people can be proactive now our society has gone to a point where we want everything to be cheap and convenient and easy well look at our environment is exactly the reason our environment is in the state that it is because we want things to be easy cheap and convenient and we need to start transitioning from that so you know when people go i keep forgetting my shopping bags really that's the excuse all right so how do we how do we remember to bring our own reusable shopping bags to the shop how do we remember to take our our own bottle and to refill it so we still need to make those actions convenient and easy and not super expensive um but we need people to actually start taking responsibility for themselves as well so we are all impacting you know even the most green conservationist on the planet has an impact it's what we choose to do with that impact um and i would say for those people that are doing everything they can that get frustrated with the people around them is don't because you're a role model and you would be absolutely surprised at how much influence that you had just by doing the good thing yourself um and you know i used to to see it before we had um single us plastic bag bands in in the state that i live in you know i would go to the supermarket to go and buy some bits and pieces and and i'd see somebody that i know and instead of saying hi to me they would turn around with this absolute look of horror and then look at their trolley and look at me as you know oh my god you know it's just it's just this once i didn't bring my bags and you know it's that it's that influence that you have because people know the expectation um and so don't get despondent keep doing the good stuff you are influencing your network nothing like a little guilt right that makes them change but you're not doing it they're guilty of themselves that's good um let's go back to microplastics we kind of glided over it they're pretty much impossible to remove first of all is that correct and are there innovations that you are privy to or instigating yeah and i think when we talk about microplastics we need to look at them in two very different sectors so we have primary and secondary micro plastics so when we look at primary microplastics we're looking at microplastics that are actually a product themselves so they're used as a micro plastic secondary microplastics are things that were bigger that are in the process of fragmenting and breaking up so they were something else and now they've been disposed of and uv and the rest of it is making them break up so i think that if we look at primary microplastics um this is something that it kind of it it kind of is a bit frustrating as well in that these are mainly lost um through the production of plastic products through the plastic manufacturers and the transportation logistic um systems and um we're basically talking about bad housekeeping in a factory so you know when we look at a one-ton bulker bag full of plastic resin pellets which are like the size of a grain of rice and they're used to blow mold into a plastic product in one of those one-ton bulker bags can be 40 million plastic resin pellets wow so when you have a spill of a cup we're talking thousands of thousands of micro plastics and it falls on the ground nobody cleans it up it rains or gets trodden on and gets stuck in someone's shoe then it enters the stormwater system and then it enters the environment so we're basically talking about bad housekeeping and the industry has absolutely um a responsibility and an opportunity to prevent that loss from their operations and they're just not doing it you know operation clean sweep is a program that the industry developed in the u.s back in 1992 for a zero pellet loss from the industry back in 92 92 now currently it's in about 22 countries in 2015 tangora blue was responsible for bringing it to australia it wasn't even happening within the the australian industry and we've partnered um with uh chemistry australia who's the plastics industry to roll this out through the industry and you know for the first couple of years it's it's like hitting your head against a brick wall why can't we get the industry to adopt best practice when they already should be doing it and when there's already legislation in place um to be enforcing it if they don't but none of it's happening so i think that from that perspective we need the industry to take absolute responsibility for the loss of micro plastics from their operations and it has to be done immediately and things like you know traps within their their premises cleanups um protocols procedures standard operating procedures we're not talking about you know anything that's super difficult to do it's just about putting the focus on it um and then when we're looking at the secondary microplastics we're looking at things that are fragmenting so the cleanup is actually a really good way of preventing one bottle from ending up as a million small bits so it's great that we're removing it from there because we know the smaller an item is the more expensive and difficult and time-consuming it actually is to remove it so while we we get those items while they're intact it's really important and i would also say that educating people around what happens to plastics is really important and you might have noticed that i've said plastic breaks up not plastic breaks down because if i say it breaks down people think it goes away eventually and we know plastic doesn't it just gets smaller until you can't see it but it hasn't miraculously disappeared so we want people to understand the plastic breaks up it becomes a bigger problem it becomes more time consuming expensive um to remove um and we know that at the moment we don't have the technology to filter that out so it's in our blood it's in our air it's in our water it's in our soil it's everywhere it's in our fish it's in our children that's everywhere you you mentioned um industry responsibility i want to know how you're dealing with government responsibility are are they on board and supportive to make what you're doing grow bigger uh you brought up the great barrier reef a couple times it seems like it would be better for tourism if all the beaches and reefs were cleaner tires removed fishing nets you know repurposed and whatnot so how you dealing with the government obviously they're giving you money so they might you must have a good relationship with them look um it's a government will invest in things that are politically um you know important to the public at the time um and that's what i guess the problem is and and it's in every country you have um you know you have political cycles and you have how long someone's going to be in power for and and they want to be popular they want to be re-elected and we don't have like that we don't have those problems in the us our government very smooth everybody loves each other well i guess that's the problem though you know like it doesn't mean that decisions are being made um for the right reasons all the right decisions being made and that's um you know that could be frustrating but uh i mean we've had some we've had some successes you know back in 2004 when tangora blue started like the first big cleanup that i did we collected data we identified in a workshop two weeks after what the main items were that we were finding we identified one item that we knew that was coming from a local source that we thought that there was a solution for and we started working with the industry and the government and six years later we got the legislative change now you know six years for a no-brainer for me was like really it took that long apparently that was fast but we got there we were able to change legislation from citizen science data engaging the right stakeholders so this for me shows that this model will work because you're providing the evidence that's needed in the format with the right people so um so it works it just takes time and you have to hang in there um at the moment you know one of our ambi partners is is called uh no balloon release australia and they're trying to work on um stopping balloon releases or making balloon releases illegal now one of our states in australia new south wales it's legal to release 19 balloons into the environment but it's illegal to release 20 balloons into the environment now nobody can explain to me when we know one balloon so you know she's been working with data and working at an industry uh government level sorry to to try and find a way to have that legislation change and one of the ways that she's been doing that is also to look at helium and the northern territory government yesterday actually released new legislation to say that it's illegal to use helium in balloons because that will now stop balloon releases both accidental and deliberate so now we're tackling the helium and we know that that's a finite resource on the planet as well it's a final resource for sure yeah yeah yeah it's about just finding the drivers and and i guess that that's one of the things is is how can somebody make the decision that you want them to my driver is from a conservation sector right but not everybody cares about turtles so what do they care about and how do we get them to the same point using that as the driver smart yeah balloons is an issue i've been working on for five years and it looks like in the next few months they're finally gonna ban the sale and release of balloons right in the little town that i live in and it's it's kind of like you were saying to me no-brainer why you know i'm going to be i'm going to be stewing on the 19 balloon issue all night by the way that makes no sense to me 19 no problem 20 no oh okay let's move on let's move on to another challenging topic i i interviewed uh cyril gooch of parlay for the oceans and he said flat out that recycling is a failed technology as you know a very small percentage of recycled items are truly recycled and reused so what are your thoughts here is recycling and antiquated technology and is there a better solution um look i think that we've we've hung our hopes too high on recycling as being the solution um i think that we all know that uh unfortunately we continue to invest in it uh and not actually in further upstream which is where we need that investment to be so so i would agree that recycling is definitely not the solution although it does have a place we can't just say no to recycling but we only need to be using recycling as the one step up from landfill as opposed to the top of the waste hierarchy um at the moment australia is going through you know a transition like a lot of other countries where we can't just ship our waste to a third world country to deal with um and so we've been looking at ways of um you know increasing our recycling in australia the the problem with this is um there's no criteria um against what is being made out of the recycled content it's like can we make something out of it yes okay do it um and not actually seeing whether that product that's coming out from it is fit for purpose or creates harm and and i think an example of that um that we're currently working on at the moment is um rubber crumb so we have 48 million tires a year that get retired from our cars in australia um and we want to know what do we do with these tyres and and so there's been significant investment from state and federal government um funding grants to create more and more recycling of tyres into products like rubber crumbs that we then go and make kids play areas with so that they don't crack their head when they fall off the play equipment um the problem is is that we know from our research that um the degradation of these rubber crumb surfaces can happen within weeks of it being installed um we know that there's something like 307 chemicals in tyres that because of the increased surface area after they're shredded release a lot easier over 190 of those are known carcinogenics so let's go and let our kids play on that as well and we have some research that's come out of canada to show that some of the dust from the tires um actually have been responsible for up to 90 of the salmon kill in some of their rivers so we know that these products are bad for our environment they're bad for our human health and yet we've got governments investing in them because they tick off some recycling target without actually um analyzing whether the whether that product is fit purpose or is it just going to make more harm and you know we've been trying to engage local councils at the moment in assessing all of their parts that they've used this product for and not using it in the future um and it's been an eye-opener for the local councils because the state and federal government have been pushing them to use it because it's recycled content and that's just an example of where we're using products that are not fit for purpose um just to get stuff out of landfill um and it's not getting it out of landfill it's really just delaying landfills you know is degrading it's not going to stand up for its life and it's going to get ripped up and end up in landfill anyway we've just given it one other opportunity to harm the environment and harm human health in the meantime definitely okay wow so a couple more topics uh you you brought up cigarette butts a while back uh steve reese who's the executive producer of this show one of his biggest pet peeves is cigarette butts he talks about it all the time and i'm pretty sure you share that same pet peeve uh tell us about ditch the flick yeah we've been really excited about this project so when covert hit um in australia we used to run all these source reduction workshops where we'd go to communities and we would you know work with the community to develop these programs and when covert hit and we couldn't do that we started to transition these workshops online and so they you know they were open to anybody that wanted to come and not just one community and out of um the workshop we wanted to tackle cigarette butts because it's the number one littered item that we find you know in our urban area cleanups um and we wanted to really understand um that point of release okay so what what causes the smoker to to flick um and you know we've heard all these solutions um about you know voting butt boards and and fines and all of these kind of things and and what we really discovered is most of the solutions that are proposed to reduce cigarette butt litter come from non-smokers and and when we started to talk about smokers about what the issues were they were totally different things that they actually wanted and so that was our first aha thing is that we need to talk to the smokers about how do we stop littering and stop talking to the non-smokers because they really don't have a clue and so that's where ditch the flick was born so um we worked uh one of the first projects that we we did was actually with the um the queensland country bank stadium which is up in townsville along the great barrier reef and they run um the stadium has the big football games um up there and so they have a massive cigarette butt litter issue during the the games and and so we worked with the the stadium in how to implement ditch the flick um and one of the things that we did first was we just went and talked to smokers um at the game about where could we where could someone go and have a city and and they they all just said are just anywhere like there's no place there's no nothing there's you know and so we thought well this is part of the problem is the smokers are walking around just smoking wherever they want there's no infrastructure they've got half time they've got 10 minutes to run out quickly and then go back in again because you can't smoke inside the stadium right so it was about understanding what the barriers were to smokers to actually do the right thing and providing them with the area and the infrastructure that they needed now we were so lucky that the stadium was so on board in being practical with this project um and wanted to do you know whatever it took and we got a 71 reduction in cigarette butt litter just in the first five games of the season last year it's massive so a lot of learnings out of that and we've been able to um to now work with other areas on ditch the flick as well and we just think it's a really good way to engage smokers and and um into doing good behavior that reduces litter by understanding actually what they need and when you think about where smokers are pushed out to have a cigarette um most the time it's all this signage that says no smoking but you don't actually tell them where they can go so they go and sneak behind a corner somewhere and that's where you get all the litter um and so it's really understanding those barriers yeah you're you're a very logical person heidi i like this don't talk to the non-smokers talk to the darn smokers it only makes sense last topic i want to bring up is operation clean sweep australia which is an international program in australia that you coordinate which aims to reduce the loss of plastic feedstock during manufacturing and transport transport the only conservation ngo coordinating this program internationally as i understand what can you share about this program yeah this has been a great model um when we discovered what a plastic resin pellet also known as a noodle was back in in 2007 um you know we thought that this stuff was coming off ocean currents and and then we started to go up our rivers and our creeks in our major urban areas we started walking around the streets in our industrial areas and we discovered really quickly that there was a significant leak of plastic resin pellets from our own domestic plastics industry we also discovered that it's not just plastic resin pellets which are you know raw virgin plastic it's it's actually all types of feedstock which include recycled chip and powder and flake um that's escaping from our industry areas and we discovered that there was a program internationally um called operation clean sweep that had been developed by the plastics industry in the us to address this but it wasn't in australia so we really thought this was a no-brainer to put a bit of focus on the issue is getting engaged with the industry and and so we were able to get some funding from the victorian state government because most of the plastics industry has presence in victoria and work with chemistry australia who helped us take all of the american resources and make them aussie um you know in regards to language and and equipment and so forth um and then we started working in rolling this out with the industry and and one thing that we discovered really quickly was that most of the industry didn't think that they were contributing to the problem um you know they didn't realize that a trickle every day equated to a really lot of micro plastic times you know 300 factories in in a catchment um they didn't see that that as being a massive problem because it was small um the other thing we found was that there was no compliance response in victoria and so when we went to the local councils and said hey these are polluters um you there needs to be a compliance response that they considered it an epa so a state government epa issue um where the state government epa considered it um not to trigger their metric of pollution which was two cubic meters or something like that so they said i was a local council issue so nobody was doing any compliance the plastics industry was just operating as they wanted to some better than others and some really atrocious so while we went to work really closely with the industry on best practice we also had to work with state and um and local government to figure out who was going to do the compliance um and in 2018 the victorian epa actually issued a guidance in handling plastic resin pellets and so from there they've been doing the compliance response um and even more excitingly um at the beginning of 2020 operation clean suite was actually listed in the australian national plastics plan at a federal level as a target so as an ngo being able to influence best practice within the plasmas industry you know we're really proud of that and when you look at operation clean sweep internationally it's all run by the plastics industry this is the only place where it's done in collaboration with an ngo and we think that that actually provides um some credibility around the program because we will hold them to account we will report polluters to the epa um and we will also engage with the industry by providing whatever support and resources that we can for them to adopt best practice so there is no excuse for this um and i think it just needs a much heavier hand on reducing the loss of this feedstock heidi i got to tell you you're a bit of a badass i love it there's there's so many people and organizations out there that maybe have a a bigger forward-facing you know name or or whatnot but the work that you guys are doing i'm i'm very very impressed and blown away so thank you for everything that you're sharing here just a couple final things as we wind down um you talked about elijah earlier and the hope of the youth of these ocean heroes that you work with you know for people like you and i that are so concerned and caring about these issues and i think for for most people these days it these problems seem overwhelming not only plastic but all the other challenges the ocean and the planet are facing how how do you do it how do you retain hope in the face of all this grim data i i think that it's really important to occasionally look behind you and see where we've come from as opposed to always just looking forward about what we have to achieve and what we have to still do and when we when we look at this space you know 2004 when i started there was one state in australia that had a container deposit scheme nobody was talking about plastic bag bans nobody was talking about single-use plastic bands and now if we look you know at australia we have container deposit schemes in every single state we have every state looking at not only single-use shopping bag bans but single-use plastic bands we have micro plastics we have a national plastics plan we have um marine debris integrated into school curriculums um we have a massive awareness you know as i said back in 2004 people thought i was talking about driftwood when i was talking about marine debris now if you walk down the street nine out of ten people um will tell you there's oceans our oceans have plastics in them and that's a bad thing like we have come far and people need to look behind occasionally it's like doing a cleanup you know occasionally look behind and look how good it looks and what you've been able to achieve and i and i think that that is part of it is keeping the hope is that change is possible it's not going to happen overnight and in most cases it takes way too long to happen but it will happen if we continue to be consistent um and persistent and we do it with a smile which is my other mantra you know that's how we have to do this we need people to understand the issue we need the data we need the evidence we need passion and we need just to keep going this is not an easy fix or an easy solution but there is solutions there we now have on the table at a un level a global treaty on plastic pollution like who would have thought that 10 years ago so don't get just bonded we are moving we are changing we are shifting the momentum is growing now is not the time to lose hope now we're finally getting somewhere let's keep pushing let's keep going wow i love it very well said so heidi we will definitely share links to everything that we talked about and people can find out about more about you and your organization if people do want to get involved with what you're doing what's what's the best way for them to do that uh look reach out on our email uh on our socials we're on all the socials um you know do a cleanup do your own cleanup if you are doing cleanups every time you go for a walk download the app record your data be part of that input of data and evidence that we need so desperately you know to to make the change so just get involved be present be aware and don't get caught by the green wash if people are telling you that they're making stuff out of ocean-bound plastic or ocean plastic and it sounds like a really good solution ask the questions make sure they're not green washing you invest and support real credibility and that means you need to do a bit of due diligence so ask the questions and be part of the solution heidi t i am extremely impressed i really love this conversation i've learned a lot i know that our viewers have also done that so i just want to say on behalf of our community thank you so much for spending this time with us today your true inspiration and keep uh keep doing the good work you're out there every day doing it and i completely admire you for it so that is our show everybody we will see you next time enjoy the rest of your day thank you

Channel: Our Epic Ocean

Views: 10,219

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Id: -_fLFYYXIMk

Length: 71min 24sec (4284 seconds)

Published: Mon May 23 2022