SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

image courtesy of Fish Forever | Bay of Islands Marine Sanctuary

by Sam Rye, Keep New Zealand Beautiful

What an amazing feeling it is to wrap up Keep New Zealand Beautiful Week, with over 24’000 bags of litter pulled from the beaches, streets, school yards & roadsides of New Zealand!

HUGE thanks needs to be passed from us, to the amazing communities around the country who came out for another great Kiwi clean up!  After all of the hard work of the Conservation Volunteers & Keep New Zealand Beautiful teams together in the run up, it is simply amazing to see everyone getting behind things and the litter piles in all the photos we’ve received.

We’d ask you to take a second to pause, to think about that number though. 24’000 bags….

That’s a lot of rubbish, and whilst all the KNZB Week crews have made a good dent, there’s more coming every day.  So, we know we need to do more – we need to change attitudes and what’s acceptable behaviour.  Next time someone you’re driving with rolls down that window and throws out a drink container – let them know children put on gloves, and walk the sides of those roads each year in the name of Keep New Zealand Beautiful – because they believe in just that – a Beautiful New Zealand for their future.

It’s time to draw a line in the sand.  We need to change our daily habits, what we buy and where the packaging & containers go when we’re done with them.  We need wholesale change, we know that now.

Where do we start? Well you’ll just have to stay tuned to our Happyzine channel, because we have another big announcement on Monday morning.  We hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Back to the wonderful volunteers who came out during 16 – 22 September to spring clean their neighbourhoods & coastlines! A big thank you from all of the team at Keep New Zealand Beautiful & Conservation Volunteers!  We’ll be compiling the stats and update people over at our KNZB site & Conservation Volunteers Facebook, so please do hit ‘Like’ and we promise you will enjoy what you see over there!

We hope you had a great Keep New Zealand Beautiful Week, and we’d love to hear your suggestions for the future of community action in New Zealand. Drop us a comment on here, or join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter!

image courtesy of Fish Forever | Bay of Islands Marine Reserve - Pictured: Lucy Doull

Tags: clean up, Community, community action, conservation volunteers, Keep New Zealand Beautiful, KNZB, KNZB Week, litter, new zealand