Hopes are high that the yield from the biggest action of this kind on the Kiel Bay so far will top last year’s yield of around 115 kg of waste. Supported by the Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean”, the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) Kiel and private businesses of Kiel the Coastal Cleanup Day 2014 will send a signal against the growing pollution of oceans and coasts. The Coastal Cleanup Day will take place at numerous other locations on all continents simultaneously. Last year 650,000 volunteers took part in it.
It is impossible to avoid the topic “waste in oceans” in 2014: In particular, plastic accumulates in gigantic vortices in the world’s oceans. Micro plastic can be found nearly everywhere in the world’s oceans, and coasts around the globe are drowning in up to 6.4 million tons of plastic waste per year. The consequences for biocoenoses of the oceans and food webs are unpredictable. Tiny bits of plastic can even be found in the human body nowadays. To draw attention to this world-wide phenomenon, the US-based NGO Ocean Conservancy has organized the international Coastal Cleanup Day on the third weekend in September for nearly 30 years. In 2013, 5.5 million tons of waste in total were collected worldwide on about 20,000 km of coastline. A strong signal of the success of the campaign is the large number of Kiel residents who want to take part again in 2014.
The ocean laboratory of the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt has assigned seventeen locations around Kiel’s Firth to teachers and their students, educators and their kindergarten children, as well as volunteers from associations in Kiel for September 20, 2014 between 10 to 13 pm. All of them have been extensively informed and will start to remove all sorts of waste from the 15 km of coastline from Strande to Laboe between 10 and 13 pm.
The team of the ocean laboratory will be present at the beaches of Falkenstein and Laboe and will carry out the entire evaluation afterwards. Everything that is found, will be collected at the collection points, selected, weighed and documented in standardized lists. The ocean laboratory will post the results in the world-wide data base of the Ocean Conservancy. All the waste will be collected by the local waste disposal companies and properly disposed of.
Financial and material support for the Coastal Cleanup Day in Kiel Day is coming from numerous sponsors and partners in the area of science and business. In addition to the Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean”” and the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) , in particular local firms such as Lindenau Maritime Engineering & Projecting or Raytheon Anschütz make the event possible with their support and help to raise awareness of the Coastal Cleanup on a regional level.
An important aspect of the Coastal Cleanup Day is the online campaign: On the project website of Ocean Conservancy www.oceanconservancy.org/our-work/international-coastal-cleanup all important information is provided, from a general overview of all international participants to a general conclusion. Additionally, those who are interested but do not have the possibility to take part at the location, can also experience the Coastal Cleanup Day in social media, e.g. under the hashtag #2014cleanup and # coastalcleanupday on twitter.
Sponsors & Partners
Lindenau Maritime Engineering & Projecting
Raytheon Anschütz
Weinhaus Tiemann
Eydam Labortechnik
IPN Kiel
ABK Abfallwirtschaftsbetrieb Kiel
Abfallwirtschaftsgesellschaft Rendsburg-Eckernförde mbH
Amt für Abfallwirtschaft Kreis Plön
Kiel Marketing
Participants
AWO Strandkindergarten Falckenstein
Caterpillar Motoren GmbH & Co. KG
DLRG Kiel e. V.
Freie Waldorfschule Kiel
Grundschule Strande
Kieler Gelehrtenschule
KMTV
Lernwerft, Club of Rome Schule
Toni-Jensen-Gemeinschaftsschule
Links
www.futureocean.org
www.forschungs-werkstatt.de
www.oceanconservancy.org
Contact and contact person for media
Dr. Katrin Knickmeier, Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean“/ school lab “Kieler Forschungswerkstatt”, Phone: 0431 880-5916, 0171 6546827
kknickmeier@uv.uni-kiel.de
Friederike Balzereit, Public Outreach Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean”, Phone: 0431 880-3032, 0160 97262502
fbalzereit@uv.uni-kiel.de
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