The Environmentalist Foundation of India (EFI), a wildlife conservation and habitat restoration group, organised ‘6-2-6’, the first ever 12-hour-long, all-night beach clean-up between Besant Nagar and Neelankarai recently.
The clean-up marathon began at the Ashtalakshmi Temple beach in Besant Nagar around 6 pm and continued well into the night, in three different slots.
With 64 ESI volunteers in the age group of 11- 18 and a number of other volunteers, Arun Krishnamurthy, founder of EFI said that they managed to clean the entire stretch, which they had set as their target. “Beach trash poses a major threat to the marine ecosystem and increased insensitivity among beach visitors is a cause of worry. To emphasise on the significance of the beach ecosystem and also to ensure that large amounts of beach trash is removed, we took permission from the Chennai Corporation to organise this,” said Krishnamurthy.
Krishnamurthy also added that they were in talks with Corporation to adopt the beach stretch and covert it into an eco-system.