Natalie Woods has holidayed in Malua Bay “since I was a baby”, but a recent camping trip to the coast with partner Daniel Smith gave her some serious adult anxiety.

“We spent a lot of summer travelling the coast, camping, from Murramarang down to Bingi,” Ms Woods said.

“We noticed such a big problem with marine debris and plastic pollution on all these beautiful beaches. 

“They are really remote, there were hardly any people there, but there was still so much. 

“We decided to clean up wherever we went camping or surfing. 

“We took along bags and did clean-ups ourselves.”

That was two months ago, and their two-person campaign has morphed into the Clean Coast Collective – a network of visitors and Eurobodalla residents who have spent four weekends cleaning up at Depot, Pebbly, Mackenzies, Bingie and North Broulee beaches.

“At Depot, we thought it was immaculate, but by the end of the day we had picked up more than 300 pieces of rubbish,” she said.

“It can be hidden, stuck under rocks, broken down into small pieces, or in the bushes or dunes.”

Why not just let sleeping rubbish lie?

“We want to dispose of it correctly, so it does not wash back out,” she said.

Otherwise, it risked joining “the five soups”, the parts of the globe’s oceans where rubbish has accumulated in massive amounts. 

The couple’s simple act of picking up a bag of rubbish after their surf has awakened them to the scale of the global problem.

“The more we did it, the more we read and realised how big the problem was, the more we wanted to bring it to our family and friends, and the wider public’s awareness,” Ms Woods said.

She said plastic did not biodegrade, but broke down into smaller pieces and became a toxic link in the food chain.

Ms Woods is using social media to engage a younger audience.

“We are trying to make it cooler to do beach cleanups,” she said. 

Even an hour could make a difference.

“If you are at the coast for the weekend, dedicate an hour after your surf, or while you are sitting on the beach, to picking up as much rubbish as you see,” she said.

Mr Smith works for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and Ms Woods works in vocational education and training for the Department of Industry.

Their organisational skills are proving useful on clean-ups.

Not content with bagging rubbish, they are sorting and counting each piece and reporting the results to Tangaroa Blue, which has a national marine debris data base.

At North Broulee over the long weekend, they picked up 443 pieces of rubbish, of which 72 per cent was plastic pollution, another 20 per cent was smaller pieces of plastic no longer distinguishable as a specific product, 16 per cent was cigarette butts and 5.4 per cent was fishing items, including glow sticks, lines, lures, rope and nets. Despite the load, Ms Woods is not pessimistic.

“There is always something that can be done,” she said.

She said the very act of picking up rubbish alerted you to your own use of plastic.