3 days, 50 tonnes: Marinastrewn with Pongal waste

CHENNAI: An estimated 5 lakh visitors and hundreds of unauthorised hawkers turned Marina Beach into a dumping ground, leaving behind more than 50 tonnes of plastic, paper and wet waste on three days of Pongal celebrations.
New Year celebrations, by comparison, generated around 5 tonnes of waste on the beach.
Corporation officials said Marina drew 2.5 lakh visitors on Kaanum Pongal.They littered the beach with 24 tonnes of waste, the highest for a single day. Each visitor to Marina over the festival dumped, on average, 100g of waste.
Celebrations at Elliot's Beach, which attracted a younger crowd than Marina, left 12 tonnes garbage in their wake over the three-day festival.
The beach resembled an overcrowded marketplace on the festival, with hordes of eateries selling popcorn, groundnut, fried fish, bajji, chat, fruit salad, sugarcane juice, soft drinks and chips. People discarded leftover food and the paper plates and plastic cups and packets they were served in on the already littered sands of the beach. When corporation workers and volunteers cleared up the mess, they piled up small mountains of waste for the civic body's garbage trucks to haul away.
Marina was most crowded in the windy evenings of all three days and, with most visitors showing complete lack of civic sense, plastic waste was flying all around the beach.
"Getting around on the beach was an unpleasant experience. The sand was littered with wet food waste and plastic," said V Indumadhi, who visited the beach on Kaanum Pongal. "There was also the danger of stepping on broken bottles for those walking barefoot."
In an attempt to limit littering, the corporation placed 50 compact bins, each with a capacity of 400kg, all along the beach. Corporation staff in three beach cleaning machines covered the stretch, scooping up loose waste, and around 200 workers swept the beach after the celebrations each night.
Another visitor to the beach, Santosh R, said the corporation would have done better to take proactive measures to prevent littering instead of spending vast resources on cleaning up the mess. "With so many unlicensed hawkers allowed on Marina, there are no checks on the source of the waste," he said.
Exnora International founder-chairman M B Nirmal said the corporation should move food stalls to a designated spot away from the sand like beaches in developed countries. "The proliferation of hawkers obstructs the sea view which is what one goes to the beach for," he said. "But the beach is abused and treated like a food court, where the overpriced food does not even meet basic safety standards."
"The beach sand must be sifted periodically so dirty soil settles at the bottom allowing fresh, clean sand to surface," Nirmal said. "A glorious beach like Marina should not be destroyed for commercial reasons."