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People and organizations volunteer to clean up Marseille’s beaches and save marine ecosystems from plastic pollution.

Marseille’s beaches have become littered with bottles, straws, plastic bags, and cigarette butts up to a point that local people had to take the matter into their own hands. 

Euronews reports that volunteers and charities have united in a big clean-up operation.  

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"We find a lot of cans, a lot of beer bottles as well. But we've also found some more unusual things, like Christmas baubles," said Gaëlle Déborde, volunteer at Clean My Calanques, a Marseille-based association campaigning for the preservation of the environment.

Apart from spoiling the beauty of the French riviera, the waste people leave behind also impacts young turtles. 

These cute little critters spend their first years feeding near the sea surface and can easily eat plastic.  And it’s not only turtles. As one kid told Euronews, ducks and fish can also eat many things and die. 

Turtles and seals, for example, easily confuse plastic bags with jellyfish and suffocate while trying to eat them.  

Elsewhere, beach cleaning events take a much wider scale. 

The Great British Beach Clean is an annual event that took place between Friday 17th and Sunday 26th September this year. In those 10 days, hundreds of beach clean-ups take place up and down the UK coast. 

People are encouraged to record all items of garbage they find in a 100m stretch and this data is used to raise awareness on the importance of using less and recycling more plastic.

Nikola, an electrical engineer, simplifies intricate sustainability subjects for his audience. A staunch environmental conservationist, he embodies his beliefs daily through recycling and cultivating his own food.

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