From tin cans to a digger track - all in a morning's clean-up at Wai-O-Taiki Bay

Volunteers who got together to clean up the coastal reserve of Wai-O-Taiki Bay on Sunday, February 23, expected to find discarded plastics, bottles, broken glass and cans —  and there were plenty of them. 

More  unusual were discoveries of wire netting, wooden pallets, a car tyre, plastic drainage tubing, a couple of sections of fencing and — the piece de resistance —  a metal digger track. It took three people to lift the heavy track off the sea wall and carry it a short distance to the grass beside the reserve’s turning circle, where they left it to be collected at a later date by Auckland Council staff.

Over a couple of hours, on a one-kilometre  stretch of  reserve land and beach between Tahuna Torea and Kotae Street, Glen Innes, we collected nine jumbo black plastic bags of rubbish in addition to the larger items mentioned above.

Sweaty and tired after carrying collection buckets and bags up and down steep tracks, we were rewarded with a barbecue lunch hosted and expertly cooked by the Engles family — Paul and Tania, and son Jacob — whose home is one of those adjoining the reserve.

If it all went like a well-oiled machine, that’s because it is. The  organisers, led by Lora Young, David Doleman and Chris Millward,  had done it all before — at three monthly intervals. Their previous clean-up was in December, and the next one will be in May.