Last Wednesday Dec. 4, the ELC hosted its first Hac-Sa beach clean-up as part of the Fall 2013 Semester Events. Students from the UM community met at Hac-Sa and spent their afternoon picking up the tiny pieces of litter that plague our ocean’s environment.  Each student was given an ELC t-shirt for attending and they were provided trash bags and gloves while cleaning.

During the clean-up, ELC teacher Marie Webb informed the students on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Students had strong reactions to the information and discussed how important picking up each small piece of trash was because of the danger it is to animals eating the trash and becoming sick or dying. They said that they felt rewarded by participating in this activity and felt that they truly helped society.

Some community members in Macau were fascinated by the event and also volunteered to join the beach clean-up effort. Even a couple on vacation from Hong Kong joined-in to help pick up trash. Some of the most common things that attendees collected were small pieces of plastic from plastic bags, cigarettes, and bottle caps.

The ELC opens its events to all of the UM community and hopes events like this can become more widely attended in the future. To register online or view the remaining Fall 2013 events log into Moodle and visit the ELC Independent Learning course. There will be more events from the ELC in the Spring semester.