Volunteers wage war on rubbish

Volunteer Jane McKenzie, from Bluff, bags rubbish from Coal River on Fiordland coast as part of the five-year project. Picture / Simon Baker

In the most remote corner of Fiordland, volunteers make a remarkable find: a cricket ball and three Barbara Streisand CDs wedged in driftwood.

The find is part of a rubbish collection project that has bagged hundreds of plastic bottles, old fishing buoys, ancient nets and the odd toothbrush.

Called the Fiordland Coastal Clean Up, the five-year project began in 2003 as the brainchild of Southland fisherman Peter Young and helicopter pilot Wayne Pratt.

For 10 days each year volunteers are helicoptered to the most remote coastline of the Fiordland National Park to collect rubbish from the shoreline.

Most of the inlets and beaches rarely see human visitors but the rubbish drifts in from the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea after being thrown or lost off boats.

Volunteers scour the beaches and bag the rubbish, which is then helicoptered to Bluff for disposal.

Two years ago the volunteers began west of Invercargill in Te Wae Wae Bay, working 76km up to Puysegur Point and collecting 200 cubic metres of rubbish along the way.

Last year they tackled the 215km of rugged coast from Puysegur Pt to Breaksea Sound, braving gale-force winds, 6m swells and snow storms.

Including the bales choppered out of Breaksea and Dagg Sounds this week, a total of more than 450cu m of rubbish - 100 truckloads - has been collected in two years.

The volunteers are rotated in two shifts over the 10 days, flying in to the beaches each day from their base on the cruise vessel Milford Wanderer.

For the project's co-founder, Wayne Pratt, the success has been a relief.

"We knew it was a bit of a massive task to get it going, involving a lot of donated time and effort from people and their helicopters and boats. But to see it come this far has been worth the effort," he said.

"It's been a word-of-mouth kind of thing but we now have a waiting list for volunteers to take part. And they come from all over with a variety of backgrounds, so it's not just the rampant greenies out here.

"It's the ordinary person who wants to keep their country as pristine as possible and is prepared to do their bit to make it happen."

Mr Pratt said the end result worked for both of the main industries that work in the area.

"Basically the fishing industry was getting the blame for the rubbish problem and the tourism industry was ultimately going to suffer as a result of it. This way we work together to fix it."

The Fiordland Coastal Clean Up is scheduled to end in Milford Sound in 2007, after which Mr Pratt hopes to tackle the south-west coast of Stewart Island.