An eco tourism operator's outraged at the rubbish he found on a remote beach on Great Barrier Island in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf.
Kurt Salmond was stunned by the amount of plastic and other waste that had washed up on the small island of Rangiahua (Flat Island), off the coast of the main island.
He filled eight big black rubbish bags in a few hours.
"I was really just scratching the surface," he said. "This beach was a plastic graveyard."
"A beach like that you almost needed to get a little digger in there and just scrape everything off."
Mr Salmond, who runs Gulf Eco Adventures, was on a four day boating trip when he came across the rubbish on his kayak.
And what's more, he was disgusted at what he saw as a lack of concern from the local community. Some boys he met on the beach didn't want to help him clean it up - and told him they didn't really care either.
"Nobody seems to actually be doing anything about it. A lot of the waste that I found there was not just washed up in the last few days, it'd piled up over a long period of time."
Mr Salmond told Newshub he didn't want to blame the locals, who he said lived in a little settlement of about half a dozen houses over the hill.
"A lot of that rubbish comes from Auckland, it's not actually the people of Great Barrier - a lot of that rubbish doesn't come from them - but they live there, it would be great if they actually cared about that environment a little bit."
He's worried that people need something to be an absolute crisis before acting.
"Why do you actually wait for it to get to that stage, why don't we just do a little bit every now and again and keep it to a manageable level?"
The Sustainable Coastlines charity specialises in cleaning up coastal waste and was actually founded on the back of a huge community clean-up on Great Barrier Island in 2009.
"The first activity we ever ran was a clean-up with the community there," co-founder Camden Howitt said.
"We had 700 people over two days cleaning up beaches all over the island. We picked up 2.8 tonnes of rubbish off those beaches."
He blames single use plastic as the main culprit, which his organisation says makes up about 75 percent of the waste that washes up on our shores.
"The oceans are downstream from everywhere, so everything that ends up on the ground and the streets and the playgrounds and our rivers, our waterways, will eventually make it into our oceans, that's why we're seeing all these problems in the Hauraki Gulf."
Mr Howitt says simply reducing consumption is the key - refuse to buy over-packaged or environmentally harmful goods and companies respond to the commercial imperative from consumers.
Plastic micro beads found in some make-up products are a great example, with many companies removing them voluntarily in response to consumer protests.
Mr Howitt says avoiding the rubbish at the source is better than having to clean it up.
"Clean-ups are always needed but as they say, if you clean up then all you're ever going to do is clean up. We need to stop this plastic, this pollution and this disrespect for the environment at the source."
Newshub contacted a spokesperson for the Great Barrier Local Board, but she didn't want to make any comment.
Newshub.
