Hand In Hand For The Coast - EPA Waste Prevention and Reduction Finalist - 2026 Tidy Towns
For years, three Rye locals argued that mechanically raking beaches to make them look tidy might actually be doing more environmental harm than the litter it was clearing. Mornington Peninsula Shire has now agreed with them, on paper.
Hand in Hand for the Coast, led by Josie Jones, Melanie Bird and Cara Hull, started as straightforward litter prevention and grew into a decade-plus body of citizen science: documenting how mechanical beach raking fragments hard plastics into smaller pieces, disturbs fragile dune ecosystems and leaves litter residue behind in the sand rather than removing it. The trio logged more than 266 biodiversity observations of endangered coastal plant species along the way, evidence that helped protect roughly 91% of local beaches from ongoing mechanical raking.
Their advocacy led to a hand-cleaning trial with the Shire, which found low-impact hand cleaning removed more litter with far less environmental disturbance than machinery. Council officers have now recommended an 80% hand cleaning, 20% mechanical model going forward, and the group's research has since been cited in the Victorian State of the Marine and Coastal Environment Report.
The lesson from more than a decade of this work: government processes move slowly, but sustained, evidence-backed advocacy from people who actually walk the beach every week eventually gets heard.
The X-factor is patience turned into policy: three residents' observations reshaping how an entire coastline gets cleaned.
Comments