Shell engineer, Saiful Ibrahim, doing his bit during the clean-up exercise at Meragang Beach, yesterday. Picture: BT/Dewi Mohd Sofri

BACK from a long hiatus, The Beach Bunch (BB) kickstarts the year with a clean-up campaign at Meragang Beach.

“Fifteen volunteers turned up, 73kg of general waste, 31.5kg of empty plastic bottles and two kg of aluminum cans were collected,” said The Beach Bunch co-founder and special duties officer, Rizan Latif.

“It’s not such a great turn up today but last year we have volunteers participating from schools like Maktab Sains, Jerudong International School and International School Brunei,” said Founder and President, Alan Tan who also joined in the activity with his wife.

The non-governmental organisation (NGO), which was formerly known as Brunei Beach Bums was established last year with a mission to protect the beaches of Brunei from pollution and has embarked on a series of cleaning campaigns around the beaches in Brunei-Muara District earlier last year before going for a break to settle issues on the group’s name.

“We have around 800 members in our FaceBook group of which 150 are from overseas,” he said in an interview with The Brunei Times.

Out of this figures, the active members were only around 40 people. Around the same time last year, BB had conducted a cleaning campaign at Tungku Beach where they managed to collect over 100 bags full of rubbish.

Shell engineer, Saiful Ibrahim who is also a member of Brunei Adventure Recreation Association (Bara) was one of the volunteers who had turned up for the activity.

“It’s very satisfying doing something for the environment. Even though it’s only a little bit, it helps. Everybody has to do their bit to make a big impact,” said Saiful who left just when the group starting to sort out the things to be sent for recycling.

He commented that Bara has also volunteered during a clean-up at the same beach in April last year and there were more people participating, then.

“There was a lot of rubbish (then),” he said, adding that there were no surprising finds during the clean-up but “compared to the one we had in April, (the amount of rubbish) was 80 per cent less which was quite good”. Another thing Saiful observed was that most of the rubbish were concentrated around certain areas and not distributed all over the shores as if it was left behind by irresponsible campers or picnickers.

“Education is always a good thing (to create) more public awareness on the public’s responsibility. It’s not just good for the environment but also for the country especially if we’re pushing for tourism,” commented Saiful.

Freelance sound engineer and blogger, Tiger Lim found out about the campaign from the group’s FaceBook page and decided to spend his Sunday morning cleaning up the beach.

“If you want to do something for Brunei you do it yourself and also encourage your children to not throw rubbish. Some people don’t realised that even cigarette butts will eventually stay in the sea for so many years,” said Lim who habitually cleans up any litter or rubbish in his sight especially during hiking at places like Tasek Lama.

“If I don’t picked up the empty bottle from the jungle, it’s going to stay there forever if nobody does. These kind of things should be automatic,” he added on the habit of ensuring a cleaner environment which is good for the future generation.

The next clean-up activity will be in March and BB has plans to carry it out on all the beaches, from Brunei-Muara to Belait District. The Brunei Times

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