On Tuesday 6th June, the ISIC Ambassadors of St Catherine’s School visited Banyan Reserve and Mordialloc Creek to examine the journey of the litter from our streets into the pipes and down to the sea.

Mandy taught us all about where rubbish goes. A lot of it doesn’t actually go in the bin. It usually goes in drains, oceans, rivers, and lakes. The Melbourne Water team showed us the litter trap at Banyan Reserve. It was disgusting but very sad how much rubbish was in the net. Daniel, who is part of the Melbourne Water team explained how much it would cost to clean out these river traps and it was a lot of money.  That’s why, as ISIC Ambassadors, we’re trying to reduce the amount of rubbish and stop landfills. – Alicia

After Mandy’s introduction, the ISIC Ambassadors all walked over to the tubs with water from Banyan Reserve in them. We had to find tiny sea creatures in the water and find them on our chart. We found a couple of small insects and they were in the very tolerant section of the chart which means they can live in water, which is not so good. Then we walked over to the water testing part and we learnt how they test water quality. The tester mixed something with the water and it changed colour. We matched the colour to the chart and found out that the water quality was pretty okay. The chart tells you whether the quality of the water is good or not. We need to ensure the water is of good quality by keeping it clean. – Rohan

We left Banyan Reserve and went to Mordialloc Creek to see how the floating litter traps work. All kinds of things go into the traps like natural oil, nerf bullets, leafs and more stuff. How they work is that there is one entry point where the current would push the rubbish into the trap and it couldn’t get out. At some later time, Council workers on boats open up the other side and collect the rubbish. It was sad to see that there was a lot of rubbish in the trap. – Xander

Following the creek, the ISIC Ambassadors visited Mordialloc Beach to pick up rubbish as part of a litter audit. We had a tally to count how much rubbish we picked up. Firstly, we were handed 2 tongs, a bag to put rubbish in and a tally sheet. We collected around 175 pieces of rubbish. We also found some very weird stuff like belts, printers and some other crazy things on the beach and we wondered why they were there.  We also showed some little kids that watched us pick up the rubbish and explained what we were doing.  It’s very sad that so much rubbish is down on our beach, despite all the hard work the council has in place to try to keep our waterways clean. – Matthew