The high season in Koh Lanta finds everyone busy with the business of diving, and we are lucky enough that our beaches are beautiful and clean and don't need any attention.

We are now in the low season, however, and the tides are starting to bring rubbish on to our shores. So, on Saturday 4th May 2013, we headed to the beach at Klong Dao, in front of Time for Lime restaurant and cooking school to conduct a Beach Clean Up. We were lucky enough to have a large group of students from the Wageningen University in The Netherlands join us. They are currently studying the effects of tourism on Koh Lanta, and so what better way to observe the negative impact of tourism than to deal with rubbish generated by visitors to Koh Lanta and the surrounding islands.

We also had volunteers from the diving community, resorts, restaurants and Lanta Animal Welfare all doing their bit to help the environment and keep rubbish out of the oceans.

We estimate that we collected somewhere in the region of 500 kgs of rubbish - an excellent start to our low season beach clean up campaign.

A massive thanks to everyone who took part and let's hope we get as many people each week.