Students clean beach, get ice-cream in return

The volunteers, including school students, corporation sanitary workers collect plastics in the beach. “We give an ice-cream to anyone who collects a sack full of plastics from the beach. On Saturday, we had more than 55 students from localschools participate in all our beach cleaning events,” said the founder of Namma beach Namma Chennai Virginie Vlaminck.

Virginie came to Chennai eight years ago from Belgium. Living near Injambakkam beach, she found that fishermen who stay near the beach throw their garbage on the shore. As she wanted to clean the beach, she took started an initiative ‘Namma beach Namma Chennai’ to help clean the city beaches.

“We have been cleaning the beach for eight years and the amount of waste thrown in the beach, especially plastics, has reduced nowas there is more awareness among the residents who live near the shore,” said Virginie.

“We want school kids to participate actively because they are our future generation and they will teach the next generation too,” she added.

As a part of the awareness campaign, Goutham, an artist, created a 25-foot killer shark with around 35,000 bottle caps in a month. “I started collecting the bottle caps from my friends and relatives as birthday gifts. It took me three months for me to collect all the bottle caps. These plastics when thrown into the sea or shore affects marine life. So, I chose to make a model of killer shark with bottle caps,” said Goutham.

School children and people who visited the beach were active in collecting the trash from the beach along with their family members. “We come here every Monday to clean the beach and also tell the public not to litter the beaches,” said Jayakumar, a Class 7 student from Advert Christian Middle school in Injambakkam.