MORE than 2,000 volunteers from Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Huizhou collected 3.38 tons of garbage from 24 beaches in Shenzhen on Sunday, organizers said.

    The cleanup campaign took volunteers to the city’s major beaches, including Dameisha, Xiaomeisha, Shenzhen Bay Park, Shekou Port and Dachan Bay.

    Fifty-nine divers also helped out. Forty divers removed more than 100 kilograms of garbage from the seabed near the shark net off Dameisha. Yantian’s ocean-conservation volunteer team sent three boats to collect garbage floating on the sea.

    The campaign was organized by the city’s ocean bureau, Yantian and Dapeng governments, and two local environment-protection groups, Shenzhen Blue Ocean Conservation Association (BOCA) and Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands Conservation Foundation (MCF). They launched the campaign following calls by international environmentalist groups Ocean Conservancy and Project Aware.

    The Shenzhen event was part of a national beach cleanup campaign launched by BOCA and MCF in cooperation with 24 other nonprofit organizations. Sanya, Shanghai, Qingdao and Dalian also saw a large number of volunteers taking to the cities’ beaches.

    This year’s cleanup campaign witnessed a rising number of residents taking part. More than 100 residents in the Peninsula and Coastal Rose Garden housing estates in Shekou volunteered to help clean up Shekou Port.

    “I will join the cleanup campaign every year. I hope my neighbors and tourists have the mind to protect the environment and take action,” Zhang Xiaomei, from the Peninsula, told Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.

    Shenzhen has a coastline of 230 kilometers with many beaches. Tourists who flood the beaches during weekends and holidays leave huge amounts of trash on the beaches and seabed. Nearly 500,000 beachgoers dumped 362 tons of garbage on Dameisha beach during the three-day Dragon Boat Festival holiday last year.  (SD News)