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Eco Challenge surfing festival |
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Eco Challenge brought to you by Surfrider Foundation Sunshine Coast, Climate Wave Enterprises & Golden Days Festival, November 20th 2011, Coolum Beach
Perfect weather for a day at the beach, with a bit of swell and lots of action, couldn’t get any better or could it? Well yes it could, through actions taken by event organisers parts of this festival were sustainable. Climate Wave Enterprises was asked to provide advice where needed to this event and we believe the organisers accomplished an excellent result in their first year with a commitment to improve these initial practises.
The surfing event was carbon neutral, with plants being supplied by Forest Tree, for people to purchase and offset their own individual carbon footprints. Other ecological footprints, such as waste and dune care, were minimised by the provision of recycling bins and fenced areas to prevent human impacts on fragile coastal systems. Also there was displays of alternative energy as in solar power and a wide range of educational material.
One of the highlights, of the event, was the plastic bottle wave, where people made their own personal pledge against reducing their plastics use. Plastic makes up 80% of the volume of litter on roads, parks, and beaches and makes up 90% of floating litter in the ocean. In every square mile of ocean there are over 46,000 pieces of plastic. More info about the detremental effect of plastics in our oceans can be viewed at the Surfrider Foundation Rise Above Plastics Blog
Also plastic has been an integral part of events rubbish which costs organisers to remove. If we can use alternative products that are less harmful to the environment this will reduce costs and impacts.
So an event looking towards sustainability at the beach you’d figure that there would have to be music, skateboarding and surfing, well you’d be right. All this took place and with a segment of the surfing component using alternative products to the normal petrochemicals with wooden Alaia surfboards which were demonstrated by Tom Wegener and brought to you by the good people from Golden Days Festival.
Greg Howell
working with the planet
Disclaimer - Any general advice given in any article should not be relied upon and should not be taken as a substitute for visiting a qualified medical Doctor.
