On Friday 14 October a group of colleagues from the IQ-EQ Netherlands office arrived at Zandvoort to start the annual beach clean. Our guide Daan was on hand to explain this work is so important. He informed the group that there are 150 million tonnes of pollution in the ocean growing by 8 million tonnes each year! He is also on a mission to clean up for 365 days of the year if you want to follow him here and his charity here. He equipped us with our litter pickers and his own plogsacks and got us limbered up with some lunges and squats! Then told us all about plogging (Plogging is a combination of jogging with picking up litter (merging the Swedish verbs plocka upp (pick up) and jogga (jog) gives the new Swedish verb plogga, from which the word plogging derives).
We started by cleaning up the boulevard leading up to the expansive beach at Zandvoort. Special mention to Ingeborg Dijke and Fernando Lopes who collected the most on the day, Tolga Aksoy who collected a large piece of plastic and to Luc Hollman who showed his surfing skills!
By the end of the 2-hour clean-up we had cleaned 55kg of waste from the beach and had a well-earned BBQ with the calming waves behind us. Thanks to everyone who got involved on the day.
