Fun With a Purpose: Filipinos Join Red Sea Cleanup

Author: 
Roger Harrison, Arab News
Publication Date: 
Sat, 2006-09-16 03:00

JEDDAH, 16 September 2006 — For the third time, and for the second year in a row, Filipinos in Jeddah, a cultural group known by the acronym FILJED, buckled down to the unprepossessing task of clearing up the garbage left on and just off the seashore. Over a ton of rubbish in more than a hundred plastic bin liners was removed and responsibly disposed of in either a landfill or in municipal dumpsters in north Jeddah yesterday.

The group, a loose association of Filipinos in Jeddah and Makkah, targeted a popular 300-meter section of beach, one of the very few where members of the public can access the sea without using expensive beach resorts.

“All the garbage we removed was new,” said Jimmy Ulanday, a martial arts instructor and master diver from Makkah who coordinated and organized the day. “It would have been so easy for these litterbugs to take their rubbish away with them rather than simply leave it and inconvenience others and pollute the environment.”

Jeddah’s coastline has been affected by the results of urbanization and private seashore development. Much of this is the result of construction of the infrastructure associated with the expansion of a major city. The garbage collected in the cleanup, said many, need never have been there in the first place.

The project, now established as a regular part of the Jeddah dive calendar, was entirely self-financed with Filipino workers and their families contributing help, food or transport to the day. However serious the focus of the cleanup may be, the mood of the groups of families and divers who had erected small tents and generated a party atmosphere was one of fun with a purpose.

The results of the day and the data collected will be fed back to Project Aware, a Jeddah-based environmental group, where it can be used by authorities to monitor their coasts and seas.

The FILJED cleanup comes as part of this week’s efforts in Jeddah by concerned sections of the dive community to highlight the need to protect the marine environment.

All the participants in the cleanup day were connected to diving in some way either as participants or members of a diver’s family. “They are all self-motivated,” said Ulanday. “They get nothing out of this except the satisfaction of doing their bit in cleaning up the mess and having three days of diving with a purpose behind it.”

Although the volume garbage was considerable, there was not much variety. Ulanday said that most of it was plastic bottles, food containers and drinks cans — all pointing to the untidy habits of picnickers. The general opinion of participants, based on the experience of two previous cleanup blitzes on the same section of the beach, was that within a few weeks the litter would return.

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