Trash Hero’s!!   So every year Koh Tao has a festival aimed at raising money and awareness for great causes such as Project Aware. This year on Koh Tao, it was decided there would be a Trash Sculpture competition. The objective was simple, build a marine life sculpture out of trash that had been collected from the island and the dive site. If the sculpture could have some sort of use after the competition then that was even better.   Here at Sunshine Divers, we take environmental issues very seriously and obviously wanted to get involved in the competition. As we are the only dive school on the island to have ‘Adopted a Dive Site’ through Project Aware. We decided to take our boat out to our dive site, Lighthouse Bay, to see what we could collect.   Our sculpture, the Jellyfish Chandelier, was built using the trash we collected from Lighthouse Bay. It consists of plastic 1ltr water bottles that are one of the scourges of the island, plastic bags, old biscuit tins, old building materials such as bamboo poles all added to some old paperwork that was collecting dust at the dive school. The only item bought for our structure were the flashing lights.   We covered our Jelly fish and biscuit tin base with paper maché made using water and flour. The jelly fish were coloured using coffee granules and water. We used sand to weigh down the base then added the old plastic bags and bottles to look like tentacles. Lastly the lights were added for final magic touch!   It was a closely fought contest with some great entries by other schools and Sunshine Divers were proud to send Natalie Hunt and Mark Wastall to collect their prize having come in as runner up to fantastic looking Sea Horse sculpture that will be sunk in the ocean to form an artificial reef.   Seeing the sculptures on show brings home how much rubbish is being dropped around our island and dive sites and whilst Sunshine will continue with their regular clean ups in Chalok and Lighthouse Bay we can all do our bit. Whenever you dive, why not take a Project Aware mesh bag with you and pick up anything that shouldn’t be there??  Every little helps!     Mark Wastall PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer Sunshine Divers