• Cate Dine.
  • Goggle Fish
  • Plastic meal

Rothesay Bay artist is passionate about clean oceans

Channel People: Cate Dine

Cate Dine is a modern gem who is dedicated to preserving our oceans by cleaning up our North Shore beaches and creating inspirational art from the plastics she finds. Channel's Nikki Davidson caught up with her to learn more about this important mission. 

Channel Magazine: What do you love most about living in Rothesay Bay?

We have a great little beach and park here. It has a lovely peaceful atmosphere popular with its local community, with no through-traffic or commercial development. I can walk to the beach in just a few minutes, breathe in the salt air and see beautiful views of the Hauraki Gulf - that's worth preserving.

How long have you lived here?

I've lived on the North Shore all my life, nine years in Rothesay Bay. It's hard to imagine what it would be like living away from the sea.

What activities or organisations are you involved with? Why are you passionate about this?

Our coastline is such a wonderful place to go walking and my initiation into cleaning up our beaches started four years ago. Whenever I went for a walk around the rocks, I'd pick up the odd piece of trash and soon needed to take a bag to carry it all. I've done more than 350 clean-ups to date and have found plastic from the 1960s still floating around.

I've since taken part in beach clean-ups with Sustainable Coastlines and joined the Sea Cleaners boat out in the harbour to see the valuable work they do. And the wonderful people from the Council's Waste Minimisation team encouraged me to see uses for plastic waste other than sending it all to landfill.

While I can’t clean up the world, I can still make a difference. With research I found amongst the shocking images of plastic pollution there were examples of artwork and photography using beach plastics. I’ve now started my own plastic art journey, and through Instagram have linked up with other awesome artists, environmentalists and beach cleaners from all corners of the globe, encouraging and inspiring each other.

What else might you be involved with if you had more time?

I hope to get some training in public speaking in the future so that I can provide plastic pollution education to our young students.

Tell us about a place that is a secret gem in Rothesay Bay?

People might not know that Rothesay Bay has its own little cave in the cliff.

Do you have a favourite local event that you look forward to each year?

Mairangi Bay's Wine & Food Festival. It's been running for a few years now and it's an enjoyable way to get local people together for an afternoon by the sea.

If you could change one aspect about your suburb what would it be?

More options to properly deal with waste at our local beaches e.g. recycling bins (there are none at present), dedicated dog-poo bins, cigarette butt bins around bench seats, and litter traps inside drains to catch plastic before it reaches the coast. What a great difference these would make!

Who would you most like to have as a neighbour and why?

Family and friends who've moved out of Auckland in the last few years so that we could see each other more often.

Follow Cate on Instagram @cleancoast_kiwi.


Issue 91 September 2018