Featured Image Credit: Afroz Shah via Twitter
About 2 years ago, Versova beach in Mumbai, India wasn’t looking too pretty. In fact, most of the beach was sitting underneath 5,000,000 kg (you read that right: 5 MILLION kilograms, or 4 million pounds) of trash, plastic debris, and other waste. The sand practically wasn’t visible, and it was considered one of the dirtiest beaches in the region.
Fast forward through time (a little over a year and a half) and lots of hard work, and it’s now a beautiful sight.
The man behind the endeavor is Afroz Shah, a young lawyer from Mumbai, who grew up along the coastal belt and recalls swimming in the water of that beach. “After my college days I moved away from the ocean where I lived,” he shared with UN Environment, “And when I came back… suddenly I saw I’d lost my beach.”
The reasoning for the trash wasn’t because people went there, but in fact because they didn’t. “Because of the direction of the wind, a lot of garbage lands at Versova,” Pradip Patade, a Mumbai Marine conservationist shared. “The beach is surrounded by slums so lots of garbage comes from there. It was not a very popular beach in terms of visitors and tourists, so its cleanup has been ignored by the municipal corporation.”
The cleaning began on a small scale in October of 2015 when Shah and his 84-year-old neighbor, Harbansh Mathur, decided enough was enough, and were motivated to do something about it. Picking up as much trash as they could each weekend, Shah considering each visit to the beach as “dates with the ocean”, and those dates eventually got many, many more people involved.
The more than 1,500 volunteers that joined in ranged wildly in age and career, everyone from local residents, schoolchildren, politicians, and even some Bollywood celebrities joined in to help in the huge cleanup.
Near the beginning of his journey, there were naysayers— those who told him it was pointless to attempt to clean the waste-ridden beach. But Shah didn’t give up, and the beach did get clean; all 2.4km (1.5 miles) of the waste that had been there, gone.
And the results are stunning.
Throughout his journey, Shah was given UN Environment’s “Champion of the Earth” award, and even congratulated by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
By the end of the project, the volunteers had not only cleaned up and removed waste by the shoreline but also cleaned up 52 of the beach’s public toilets, and planted 50 coconut trees to try to restore it even more to how Shah remembered.
The amazing transformation of this beach shows what, with just a little bit of determination and a lot of work, people can achieve to relieve our oceans of the pollution they’re facing.
With 1.4 billion pounds of trash ending up in the ocean each year, this kind of beach makeover treatment might be exactly the remedy that needs to be brought to more areas, because what’s picked up from our beaches won’t be washed out into the ocean, making things safer for ourselves, the animals who live there, and the environment.