Take 3 for the Sea was founded in 2009 by three ocean lovers — youth educator Amanda Marechal, marine ecologist Roberta Dixon-Valk and me, Tim Silverwood. We shared a growing concern about plastic pollution and wanted to create a simple way for everyone to be part of the solution.

The idea is incredibly simple: take 3 pieces of rubbish with you when you leave the beach, waterway, park or anywhere in nature.

That simple action has grown into a global movement. From the beginning, education has been at the heart of Take 3. We started by working with schools and early learning centres to help young people understand plastic pollution and what they can do about it. Today, we work across schools, communities, businesses, surf clubs and many other parts of society to turn awareness into meaningful action.

Support from partners like Sande gives Take 3 the capacity to deliver education, community engagement and advocacy programs that create real-world impact.

Over 17 years, more than 1.1 million students and young people have been educated through Take 3 programs and resources, and our community has helped remove more than 69.5 million pieces of rubbish from the environment.

But our impact goes beyond clean-ups. We’ve also played an active role in advocating for solutions that prevent plastic pollution at its source — including plastic bag bans, container deposit schemes and broader reforms to reduce unnecessary plastic.

Long-term partnerships are particularly valuable because they allow us to keep building on this work, reach new audiences and invest in solutions that can create lasting change.

That dollar directly supports Take 3’s mission to turn off the plastic tap.

There is still an enormous amount of work to do. Every contribution helps us educate more young people, engage more people in taking simple actions, and give our community the tools to make a difference.

Increasingly, it also helps us measure the collective impact of those actions. By better understanding what our community is collecting and where, we can turn individual participation into useful data and evidence that supports advocacy for policy reform and systems change.

So that $1 becomes part of something much bigger: building a community that doesn’t just clean up plastic pollution, but helps prevent it in the first place.

There’s a simple saying we often use: if all we ever do is clean up plastic pollution, that’s all we’ll ever do.

Clean-ups are incredibly valuable because they protect wildlife, improve our environment and connect people directly with the problem. But ultimately, we need to stop plastic pollution at its source. That’s what we mean by turning off the plastic tap.

Education and community action help build the awareness and political will needed to make that happen. In Australia, that includes stronger producer responsibility for plastic packaging, nationally consistent container deposit schemes, and significantly expanding reuse and refill solutions.

These are practical, achievable changes that can reduce the amount of plastic being produced and discarded, rather than continually asking communities to clean it up afterwards.

Our new strategy is about taking Take 3’s impact to another level while staying true to the simplicity that has made the movement successful.

One major focus is developing new technology that will make recording a Take 3 incredibly simple, fun and rewarding. Imagine photographing what you collect and having image-recognition technology help identify and record those items, while gamification, challenges and leaderboards show the collective impact being created. Our goal is to record 9 million items removed by 2030.

We also aim to educate and engage another 1.5 million people and build a growing community of Ocean Defenders — highly engaged people equipped with the knowledge and tools to lead positive change in their schools, workplaces and communities.

Importantly, we want to capture more of what we call the Take 3 Ripple Effect: the stories of how one person taking action inspires someone else, who then influences others. That’s how simple actions become powerful movements.

Start with your Take 3 — but don’t stop there.

Next time you’re at the beach, a park, a waterway or anywhere in nature, take 3 pieces of rubbish with you. Photograph what you collect, share it and tell people why you’re doing it. Your simple action can influence your family, friends, school, workplace or community, creating a ripple that travels much further than those original three pieces.

More broadly, I encourage people to think about their own relationship with plastic — what they buy, what they throw away and where they can choose reuse over single-use.

The ocean sustains life on Earth, from the air we breathe to the climate we depend on. Protecting it ultimately means protecting ourselves too.

And finally, a huge thank you to the Sande community for your incredible support. Partners like Sande help us turn ripples of individual action into waves of change.