How much rubbish can you find in two hours?

These amazing images were taken by Cath Dine, who lives on Auckland’s North Shore. Each photo shows artfully arranged rubbish she picked up from the coast – Mairangi Bay area and the other at Kennedy Bay – during a couple of hours in 2014.

Cath is currently wrapping up an amazing year-long project, picking up and photographing litter from the shore near her home. She wrote to us to explain her story:

“In late 2013, a group of us were made redundant by a local company in Takapuna, due to changes in the business.

When I finished up at my job, I started going for walks around the coast in our neighbourhood as the weather late last year was great. Each time, there was rubbish evident on the paths, sand and rocks. I started to pick up the odd piece and soon realised I'd need to take a rubbish bag on walks as there was too much to carry. What started as a clean-up once a week or fortnight in late 2013 became sometimes two to three times a week in 2014. As autumn and winter arrived with several bad storms, they brought a huge amount of rubbish with them.

The shocking internet images of marine life affected by human trash and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are what keep me going. If I pick up one plastic shopping bag, I might save a turtle's life. (Turtles can mistake plastic shopping bags for jellyfish, which they eat.) There are plenty of people who stop and chat and thank me for doing a good job. One lovely older couple even carried some of it for me as there was between 10–20kg of trash that day, with soaking wet drapes and cushions amongst it. Another couple helped me pick up plastics on our local beach.

Currently I carry most of the rubbish home. Obviously some of the bigger pieces such as tractor tyres are too heavy or bulky. Everything brought home is laid out and photographed, the types of rubbish are recorded and counted with that information going to Sustainable Coastlines, and then it's recycled where possible. My goal is to create a double-page spread to go in our national newspaper (with sponsorship, obviously) to raise awareness of the state of our coastlines; it will feature a montage of photographs, showing a year's rubbish collected off the coast. Because I have an artistic and photographic background, I have plenty of other ideas formulating as well.

We seriously need to love the Hauraki Gulf a whole lot more, it belongs to all of us. The list of items I've found is in the hundreds and my collections to date exceed 25,000 pieces. That's what just one person can do and there are plenty of other people and organisations around the country doing a fantastic job of cleaning up our coast and educating our young people. Imagine if we all picked up just five pieces each time we were out and about.

I now try to live in a much more sustainable way. At home we reuse or eliminate plastic packaging and have reusable fabric bags for our fruit and groceries and for our supermarket shop. I no longer purchase skincare products from Hong Kong, which arrive in a box full of one-use polystyrene, opting instead to buy from local suppliers such as Ocean Organics who use recycled shredded paper for packaging and have much healthier products.”