SYDNEY: Thousands
of activists fanned out across beaches and rivers throughout Asia yesterday,
picking up rubbish and drawing attention to the amount of trash that is dumped
worldwide, a day after millions marched to urge world leaders to act on climate
change. The volunteers turned out for World Cleanup Day - an initiative that
has got millions into the streets and cleaning up litter across the globe since
it began just over a decade ago.

The Pacific
island nation of Fiji swung into action early, with people scouring
palm-fringed beaches for rubbish, heaving discarded car tyres and engine parts
from the coast just west of the capital Suva. On Australia's Bondi beach
activists sifted through the sand, carting off bits of plastic and cigarette
butts. In the Philippines, some 10,000 people swept across a long stretch of
beach on heavily polluted Manila Bay, clutching sacks they filled with rubbish.
Plastic pollution is a major problem across Southeast Asia, but particularly in
the Philippines, which - along with China, Vietnam and Indonesia - is
frequently listed among the world's worst offenders.

"It's for us
to help the environment, especially here in Manila, there's a lot of
garbage," Mae Angela Areglado, a 20-year-old student told AFP as she
pitched in with the cleanup - held right next to the city's huge Baseco slum.
"(Plastic is) affecting the marine life because they think that it is
food", she added. The mass cleanup is coordinated by the Let's Do It
Foundation, which aims to "connect and empower people and organizations
around the world to make our planet waste free", according to its website.

It attracted
around 1,400 volunteers in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, where they scoured different
areas of the city for litter under the scorching sun. "Although our
actions are very small - like cleaning trash from the sidewalk - it could
spread a meaningful message," 18-year-old Hoang Thi Hoan told AFP, as
motorists zipped by on a busy street.  In
China, a group of about 30 gathered by the Xiaotaihou River in Beijing to pick
up rubbish along the manmade waterway.

"You can't
get permission to organize large events in Beijing due to tight security ahead
of the 70th anniversary celebrations," organizer Zhang Hongfu, from the
environmental group Friends of Nature, said. Seventy-nine percent of the
plastic ever made has ended up dumped, with little reused or destroyed despite
recycling and other initiatives to curb use, a UN report from 2018 said. Just
nine percent of the nine billion tons of plastic the world has produced has
been recycled. - AFP