Take 3 awarded Community Litter Grant by NSW EPA

Take 3 is excited to announce that they have been awarded a Round 7 Community Litter Grant by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA). The EPA’s Community Litter Grants program is designed to support its statewide litter reduction targets through community leadership and the development of litter prevention activities.

This grant will fund Take 3’s Ground Swell project, which will be officially launched in March 2022 and will run until the end of the year. The project will focus on litter reduction in the visitor (tourist) economy. In NSW, tourists generate 25,000 tonnes of litter every year. Globally, more than 35 million tonnes of solid waste is generated by tourists each year. 

Tourism waste varies seasonally and is generated in areas sensitive to littering, putting pressure on waste management facilities during peak seasons and damaging high value natural resources. The Ground Swell project will inspire ownership of the litter problem and empower the visitor economy industry to achieve the NSW litter reduction targets of a 30% reduction in plastic litter by 2025 and a 60% reduction in total litter by 2030. 

Take 3’s First Wave Royal National Parks Workshop, 2021

Take 3 will lead a co-ordinated, whole-of-industry approach to rolling out litter prevention and enabling progress towards statewide litter reduction targets. The project will bring together new and current partners on the issue of litter, including NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Outdoors NSW, Caravan and Camping Industry Association of NSW, Destination NSW,  Walshe Group and AAT Kings. Jenny-Lee Scharnboeck, interim CEO of Take 3 said, “Although the visitor economy relies on litter-free pristine visitor destinations, very few businesses have a position or policy on litter. Take 3 is excited to work with the EPA and our partners across the industry to address this problem.”

Ground Swell follows the successful completion in 2021 of Take 3’s First Wave project. This project began to develop a shared vision for litter prevention in the NSW visitor economy. It introduced litter awareness and provided resources and tools to assist NSW tourism businesses to drive behavioural change by visitors to NSW.

Ground Swell picks up where First Wave ended by continuing to share litter prevention practices with businesses in the visitor economy sector, encouraging them to develop action plans to address litter and plastic waste, and engaging them with Take 3’s Litter Reduction Toolkit for Tourism Operators. 

“One of the critical parts of this project is the creation of a baseline for visitor litter data.” said Roberta Dixon-Valk, Co-founder of Take 3.  “At present there is no established baseline specifically for visitor litter data in NSW, making it very difficult to assess the impact of litter reduction measures. The Ground Swell project will work with stakeholders to collect and catalogue litter at visitor hotspots across the state, creating a baseline against which we can track the reduction in litter as a result of this project.”

 As a highly-regarded charity with a long and successful history dedicated to reducing the impacts of plastic litter and waste in the ocean and wider natural environment, Take 3 for the Sea believes in simple solutions to big problems and is looking forward to working with partners to have a significant impact on litter in the visitor economy industry.

This project is a NSW Environment Protection Authority, Waste Less Recycle More initiative funded from the waste levy.