Great Scot May 2020 Great Scot 159_MAY 2020_ONLINE_V3 | Page 13

JUNIOR SCHOOL
THIS IMAGE: AN RMIT
SCIENTIST TALKS TO THE BOYS
ABOUT THE IMPACT OF LITTER
ON THE ENVIRONMENT.
BELOW, LEFT: THE BOYS
EXAMINE THE MESSAGE IN A
BOTTLE.
BELOW, RIGHT: AFTER A LITTLE
TREPIDATION, THE BOYS
THROW THEIR BOTTLES INTO
WATTS RIVER.
LITTER TRACKERS: a message in a bottle
It’s a common sight in many a Melbourne street: cigarette butts
and other discarded items littering the pavement. According to the
City of Melbourne, cigarette butts make up about one-third of the
one billion items of litter entering Melbourne’s waterways each year,
and they can take up to 15 years to break down. The other two-
thirds of litter includes plastic bottles, plastic wrapping, polystyrene
packaging and aluminium cans.
RMIT University says 95 per cent of litter transported through
stormwater drains into rivers, ultimately ends up on beaches in Port
Phillip Bay. An article in The Age last July revealed that an estimated
1.4 billion pieces of rubbish flow into the sea annually from the Yarra
and Maribyrnong Rivers.
To help reduce the volume of litter entering our bays, RMIT
University has created ‘Litter Trackers’. It’s a project aiming to
educate the community about the environmental impact of litter
entering our waterways. Early in Term 3, 2019, some young Scotch
boys were caught on camera throwing plastic bottles into Watts
River, Healesville. But before any conclusions are jumped to, the
bottle throwing was actually done in a good environmental cause.
It’s fair to say the boys did have some instinctive misgivings about
throwing plastic items into a river, but they realised the cause was a
good one. The plastic bottles each contained a GPS device, and in
all, 100 bottles containing GPS devices were launched into creeks,
rivers and other bodies of water throughout Victoria. In a kind of
‘message in a bottle exercise’, the bottles were tracked for a month
and then collected for research.
The bottles might be trapped in vegetation along creeks or rivers,
or travel right through to the sea, but the project will indicate what
happens to water-borne litter – how far it travels and at what speed,
and where it accumulates.
Before the boys launched their bottles into the river, a
scientist from RMIT University and a representative of Healesville
Environmental Watch spoke to them about the impact litter has
on the environment; and before despatching the bottles, the boys
collected litter in the Watts River vicinity. Back at school, the boys
have also spent considerable time discussing the impact of rubbish
on our waterways and the bay.
www.scotch.vic.edu.au Great Scot
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