Stars Shine a Light on Marine Debris

In April, Tangaroa Blue Foundation and We-Refill joined together for a beach clean-upduring BluesFest,one of Australia’s longest-running and largest music festivals. The clean-up event was part of the global launch of the #BYOBottle campaign, and they had a little help from their friends. While bands were playing and festival-goers were reveling, a few stars took some time out to join a crew of volunteers to give back.

Heidi Taylor, CEO of Tangaroa Blue said, “It’s important that we shift the way people think about the activity of cleaning up rubbish in our environment. It’s something that we use to do as punishment when I was a kid – remember “scab duty” at school? Now we want people to feel that it’s a positive action, and having people with a public profile highlighting the importance of leaving it better than you found it helps shift the social norm about picking up rubbish.”

Check out our video which was filmed during an intimate, invite-only beach clean-up held at Brunswick Heads, with a few lucky volunteers winning a spot to hang with Jack Johnson, Dirt Girl and Lukas Nelson. Also present was Peppermint Magazine, who covered the event. The #BYOBottle campaign is a global campaign to get the music scene to go plastic water bottle free, a goal they share with We-Refill who provided 11 Refilling Hydration Stations to Performers and attendees across Bluesfest which reduced over 24,500 single-use plastic water bottles just back of house compared with last year. From the We-Refill website, “We are proud to join the BYOBottle Campaign, a music industry effort to reduce plastic waste by promoting reusable water bottles and water refill stations at music events. Artists, venues, festivals, and fans are joining not-for-profits and business partners to turn the tide on plastic pollution… momentum to promote solutions in the music scene is growing.”

To learn more, visit we-refill.com or tangaroablue.org. To join the #BYOBottle visit www.byobottle.org/join. You can sign-on as a fan, business, musician, etc. and receive customized resources.