The year was 1980. I was conducting fish research on the Great Barrier Reef, off Cape York in Queensland, northeastern Australia. After a lengthy dive, I decided to take a short rest and then explore a small, unoccupied sandy islet nearby for signs of nesting sea turtles and terns in that wonderful ocean wilderness far removed from civilization.

I anchored my boat and swam to the islet, where I was immediately startled by the immense accumulation of trash on the beach, including glass and plastic bottles and other debris whose identifiable origins other than Australia included Taiwan, China, New Zealand, the United States, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Costa Rica and Mexico. Having been discarded at all these places around the Pacific Rim, how long these items had floated with the currents was anyone's guess.

Astride currents of trash

Since that deeply disappointing day so long ago, millions more tons of garbage have been dumped into the sea to pollute the marine environment. Once "out of sight," this is forgotten by the bulk of humanity despite its very real threat to wildlife and its role in reducing ocean biological productivity.

The location of the Japanese islands astride two major ocean currents, the warm Kuroshi from the south and the cold Oyashio from the north, ensures that its beaches are littered with trash from all around the Pacific Rim on a daily basis. This nation's once gorgeous shores have become filthy with garbage to the point that the problem can no longer be ignored.

Fortunately, over the past 13 years, beach cleanups have become increasingly popular throughout the country, with representatives from numerous nonprofit organizations, clubs, businesses, schools, etc., taking part, especially from spring to autumn. Additionally, the current trend to "volunteer for the environment" has led to an amazing increase in beach cleanup activities in the past two or three years.

However, my still-limited experiences with beach cleanup groups have shown that by far the majority of participants view the problem from the narrow perspective of merely beautifying a particular site, without recognizing that for every ton of trash picked up, millions of tons of the dangerous stuff is still out there threatening wildlife. As a result, the true environmental value of beach cleanup programs can potentially be far wider.

It was with this in mind that, in 2001, Keiko Suzue, leader of the Amway Nature Center of Amway, Japan Ltd., conceived a "direct-action" beach cleanup program in which education of children would become a primary focus. Before, during and after a cleanup, participants -- in the main, family groups -- would be introduced to the true environmental damage brought about by humanity's trash. The Amway Nature Center quickly teamed up with Azusa Kojima, founder of the Japan Environmental Action Network, to develop an educational series of cleanups, beginning this year.

Kojima is certainly one of Japan's leading experts on oceanic garbage pollution, and JEAN is the Japan representative of the U.S.-based Ocean Conservancy. Kojima's efforts have resulted in detailed garbage classification, pinpointing specific types of garbage to specific localities and, as much as possible, recording the types of environmental harm caused by specific garbage types. For example, we now know that very tiny, eroded bits of plastic from children's toys and plastic appliances are eaten by krill and other plankton -- thus having a dangerous or lethal impact on this critical level of the marine food chain.

Beginning early this year, the Amway/JEAN program touched thousands of participants at nine locations, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. It was my pleasure to participate in five of these sessions -- at Dream Beach, near Otaru in Hokkaido; Sangenya Beach in Chiba Prefecture; Shonan Beach at Enoshima, Kanagawa Prefecture; a riverside cleanup on the Tamagawa in Tokyo; and a lakeshore cleanup at Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture.

Duty to the environment

At every site, the majority of participants with whom I talked joined the program in whole or part from a sense of duty to the environment and society. Most of these same people were, however, initially totally unaware of the immense damage being done to the oceanic environment in general.

These volunteers' initial purpose had been to help make the beach or shoreline a cleaner and more pleasant place for weekend leisure activities. Invariably, however, at the end of a day spent collecting everything from PET bottles, plastic toys, lighters and flip-flops to old fishing nets, firehose, bikes, BBQ sets (a particularly common blight) and even rubber and fiberglass boats, their focus had changed. Ironically, by then, they had come to realize that the environmental effects of their efforts were so minimal as to be practically insignificant. Instead the real value of the education-centered cleanup was their new awareness of the fact that we humans -- through careless littering, lack of strict government controls on garbage disposal and widespread ignorance of ocean ecology -- are badly damaging the precious biological diversity of the oceans that cover roughly 70 percent of our planet's surface.

Awareness is the first step to action. By focusing on families with young children, the Amway/JEAN program is planting seeds of environmental awareness in young minds -- hopefully leading to a more informed, less destructive society as the children become adults.

Kojima and JEAN regularly team with other beach cleanup groups, including dive shops and their customers, schools and colleges, to spread similar educational messages throughout Japan. A major discovery in such programs is that a lot of the trash on Japan's beaches has its origins in faraway places, so highlighting the fact that oceanic pollution -- like numerous other environmental problems -- cannot be eliminated by a single nation in the absence of global efforts and standards.

Clearly, young participants in cleanup programs such as JEAN's and Amway's are getting a superb education -- one that, sadly, the current U.S. president apparently never received.