It is summer holidays for the schools in HK so today was a beach day. I packed a bag, got the kids ready and we headed off to our local beach. I didn’t pack any toys for them because I knew they would find things to amuse themselves with when we got down there. And I wasn’t wrong! Before we had gone 3 metres we found a football, a little bucket and a play watering can. They built sandcastles, wrote in the sand and played with the ‘treasures’ they found on the beach. Sounds like a nice morning if you don’t see the pictures.
We then walked along the beach and collected things of interest. Evie picked up toothbrushes and Finn & Keira picked up little toys and bottle lids. I collected the large plastic drums. The tally for collection was as follows
Evie – 34 toothbrushes and 1 toothpaste tube
Finn & Keira – 298 lids and 14 toys
Tracey – 11 fuel or chemical containers
After we had collected our big treasures we hunted easily through the sand for the small nurdles* or ‘mermaid tears’. Because it was gettting hot and the kids had been promised ice creams we did this for 5 minutes and collected close to 100 in a 30cm square patch. They were so unbelievably prolific it was actually quite shocking for me.
So we packed our beach bits in my bag, wandered off to the shops to wash our hands and eat some ice cream. A great morning at Sam Pak Wan, Discovery Bay!
*Nurdles are pre production plastic pellets. They are produced by the billion around the world and shipped, trucked or transported by train to factories to be turned into everything plastic. Unfortuanetly they also escape in the millions, travel easily through waterways and are found on every single beach in the world. I am not surprised they are so prolific in HK with the amount of industry around us. The nurdles are known attractors for persistant organic pollutants (POPs) which are toxic chemicals that adversely affect human health and the environment. The POPs can accumulate and pass from one species to the next through the food chain.