All 4 Diving Indonesia & Mermaid Liveaboards Earth Day 2016

For the third year running All 4 Diving Indonesia & Mermaid Liveaboards have joined forces to host an educational Earth Day Bali 2016 support event for local school children in Bali attended by 30 kids from C3 and Compassion Kids Renon in Bali at Semawang Beach.

The event started with lunch served in traditional banana leaf wrappers to save on packaging followed by a presentation from Trash Hero on the importance of avoiding to use plastic bags or straws and by using the garbage bins and recycling instead of littering. The videos that were shown hopefully helped people to  understand the negative impact of the garbage and plastic on our environment affecting both humans and animals.Trash Hero presented the techniques for identifying the different types of trash and gave ingenius ideas of how to re-use the plastic bottles by constructing Eco Bricks.

Next up was the glass bottom boat ride which is always an overwhelming amount of fun, giving the opportunity for the kids to discover the beauty of the underwater world! Their happiness on seeing the small beautiful fishes swimming in Sanur is contageous.

Back to shore for refreshments and the Drum Garbage Bin Painting Competition began. The kids, divided in 6 groups, had the mission of decorating each bin by painting them with scenes from the underwater world. Their imagination and skills are stunning! The beautifully decorated Drum Garbage Bins have been placed in different locations along the beach surrounding Semawang harbor as part of a PADI Project AWARE campaign against debris, supported by All4Diving Indonesia and Mermaid Liveaboards.

After the tea break and some games, the 2016 Semawang Beach clean-up started. Equipped with gloves, the kids were given green and red trash bags from Eco Bali Recycling to collect and separate the trash. The different teams, excited, scuttled away in different directions down the beach to collect all the garbage and put their newfound knowledge into practice. In less than 20 minutes the bags were completely full!

More than 86 kg were collected this year!

The three best Garbage Drum teams, selected by 5 judges, the three kids who came back from the beach clean up with the heaviest bag and the winners of the multiple games played during this special day received wonderful prizes kindly donated by Master Selam, Divesport, Tusa and Wave Hunter.

Each participant proudly received a certificate of participation.

We hope the kids will share this funny and educational experience with friends and family and together make a difference by making every day Earth Day!