This project was started by a collaboration of New Zealand non-profit organisations, including Sustainable Coastlines, Keep New Zealand Beautiful, Sir Peter Blake Trust, Social Innovation and Watercare Harbour Clean-up Trust. We love our coasts and we work with our sleeves rolled up to look after them.

So far, we've picked up over 1,015,634 liters of rubbish! And with more and more clean-ups happening per year, the numbers can only increase. With your help, hopefully we'll be able to keep this momentum going and keep New Zealand green.

Why should we pick up this rubbish? In 2011, New Zealanders sent an average of nearly 560 kilograms of waste per person to landfill, making us one of the worst producers of waste in the world. When you consider that there are over 4 million of us, that's a lot of rubbish.

And it woun't just dissapear when it gets to the ocean. The ocean is downstream from everywhere. When we drop litter or leave rubbish lying around, wind and water carry it out to sea.

At least 44 per cent of marine bird species are known to eat plastic. Last year a sperm whale calf found dead in the Aegean Sea contained all kinds of rubbish, including 100 plastic bags. A floating plastic bag and a jellyfish look nearly identical!

Plastics are riddled with chemicals to create useful qualities such as flexibility or transparency. Wind and ocean currents direct rubbish that has been dumped, dropped, buried or blown out of landfills into 11 patches in the ocean, over a period of about five years. Of these, the best known is the "great Pacific rubbish patch" in the northwest Pacific which stretches about 700,000sq km.

Children taking part in a beach clean-up as part of our Great Coromandel Clean-up made a grisly discovery in Colville Harbour last week. Among the food wrappers and bottles collected from the beach, a decomposing carcass of a seabird was found with chunks of plastic where its stomach once was.

The bird -an Oystercatcher- was discovered by students from Colville School just minutes after they had learned about this problem during an educational presentation from Camden Howitt. Oystercatchers normally feed on molluscs, but this one had eaten several shards of plastic, mistaking them for food.

In this section we have some downloadable resources for you to help spread the word of beach cleanups. We also have a downlaodable flyer containing many simple facts to help you on your way to keep our beaches clean.

It's going to take all of us working together to keep our coasts the way they should be: rubbish-free. So please help us spread the word by sharing our site with your friends and family. The more the merrier.

To help get people excited about your organised event, we'll deliver you a large hollow model of a seagull on the day. People can fill it up with the rubbish collected, and when it's finished we'll pick it up and take it to a currently undecided place, where it will be displayed alongside other full seagulls.

This piece will hopefully help show New Zealanders how serious this problem is, and create more change and interest in the clean up events.

This seagull is made out of 100% recycled plastic, created out of plastic we've picked up ourselves. It can be hung, or we can send you some driftwood so you can build your own podium. Or it can be simpily stick in the sand.

To the right is a picture of it at the Makara Beach cleanup.