The beach clean up took place on 23 September - a hot and sweltering Sunday. The Green Machine’s aim was to to clean up East Coast beach - as much as possible - by picking up trash (recyclable and non-recyclable) like straws, plastic bottles, and cigarette butts. Students toiled away on the beach, looking high and low for trash that should be disposed of.

One would think that in Singapore, there should not be too much to do. But this wasn’t the case. One student even told us that the beach was relatively clean at first glance. However, students persevered and they found one particularly dirty area under a bridge. Plastic bottles, ropes, nets, and styrofoam were everywhere. With rigour and enthusiasm, they went under the bridge and tried to collect as much of the trash as they could.

Crouching in the grubby, seaweed-strewn sand, the team picked up juice bottles, plastic straws, and even styrofoam food containers. While some of the trash, like wrappers and straws, may have washed up onto the beach from the sea, it was baffling to see so much litter in the area - especially given the number of rubbish bins along East Coast beach. There was so much trash that even filling up two whole trash bags was not enough to make a dent in the amount of litter there.

While it was a small team of 51 people, they tried their best to clean the beach up as much as humanly possible. This was evident during the weighing session at the end of the day - the trash collected turned out to weigh a whopping 102 kg in total! The waste was given to NEA to be incinerated, and students went home happy to have been able to do their part for the environment.

Well done, everyone, for taking action to ensure our environment is here for future generations and beyond!