Speaker Spotlight #1
by Jillian Browning • April 18, 2016 • Announcements, Events, Research • 0 Comments
In the lead up to our Annual Marine Science Forum on the 28th and 29th of May, we will feature a post about each of the scientists presenting this year.
This week we would like to introduce you to:
Heidi Taylor
Forum presentation: If all we do is clean-up, that’s all we’ll ever do!
Volunteers across the country spend countless hours every year removing other people’s rubbish from Australia’s coastline. The only problem is every time they return, there’s more rubbish to collect! The Australian Marine Debris Initiative’s framework takes community beach clean-ups and data collection to create the basis of local Source Reduction Plans that stop the flow of rubbish into our oceans in the first place. Stopping rubbish at the source means one day no more rubbish on our beaches!
Bio
Heidi has always been an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, so when she was working as a scuba instructor and started finding rubbish everywhere, her only option was to act. In 2004 Heidi co-founded the Tangaroa Blue Foundation as a way of addressing the ever-increasing threat of marine debris in our oceans. It is currently estimated that there are about 18,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of ocean, impacting 77 Australian species. Through the Tangaroa Blue Foundation Heidi has inspired over 50,000 people to volunteer their time to participate in beach clean- ups all over the country, and helped remove over 5.3 million individual piece of rubbish from the marine environment at over 1,700 different sites across Australia.