A
beach cleaner is a vehicle that drags a sifting device over
beachA beach is a geological landform along the shoreline of a body of water. It usually consists of loose particles which are often composed of rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, or cobblestones...
sand to remove rubbish and other foreign matter. Smaller beach cleaners are either manually hand-drawn or pulled by quad-bike or tractor. Seaside cities use beach cleaning machines to combat the problems of
litterLitter is waste that people unlawfully dispose of outdoors. It can be packaging or other unwanted items. Litter can be vandalism, carelessness, or inadvertence. Litter is a form of visual pollution. It can harm health, safety, and welfare...
left by beach patrons and other
pollutionPollution is the introduction of contaminants into an environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms . Pollution can take the form of chemical substances, or energy, such as noise, heat, or light...
washed up on their shores. A chief task in beach cleaning strategies is finding the best way to handle waste matter on the beaches, taking into consideration beach erosion and changing terrain.
A
beach cleaner is a vehicle that drags a sifting device over
beachA beach is a geological landform along the shoreline of a body of water. It usually consists of loose particles which are often composed of rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, or cobblestones...
sand to remove rubbish and other foreign matter. Smaller beach cleaners are either manually hand-drawn or pulled by quad-bike or tractor. Seaside cities use beach cleaning machines to combat the problems of
litterLitter is waste that people unlawfully dispose of outdoors. It can be packaging or other unwanted items. Litter can be vandalism, carelessness, or inadvertence. Litter is a form of visual pollution. It can harm health, safety, and welfare...
left by beach patrons and other
pollutionPollution is the introduction of contaminants into an environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms . Pollution can take the form of chemical substances, or energy, such as noise, heat, or light...
washed up on their shores. A chief task in beach cleaning strategies is finding the best way to handle waste matter on the beaches, taking into consideration beach erosion and changing terrain. Beach cleaning machines work by collecting sand by way of a scoop or drag mechanism and then sifting anything large enough to be considered foreign matter, including sticks, stones, rubbish, syringes and other items.
Common technologies
Collecting technology
is used in wet
sandSand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.As the term is used by geologists, sand particles range in diameter from 0.0625 to 2 millimeters. An individual particle in this range size is termed a sand grain...
, hard surfaces and dirt on surfaces only.
When using this method, the pick-up blade of the vehicle barely touches the surface, tines go into the sand and throw the dirt onto the screening belt. This procedure is of high cleaning speed and mainly used for large surfaces.
Sifting technology
is practiced on dry sand, soft surfaces and on sand which also has
wasteWaste is unwanted or unusable material.In living organisms, waste is the unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from them. More commonly, waste refers to the materials that are disposed of in a system of waste management.Waste is directly linked to human development, both technologically...
buried deep inside.
The sand and waste are collected via the pick-up blade of the vehicle, leaving the sand which is filtered out by the vibrating screening belt. The waste is gathered in a collecting tray which is often situated at the back of the vehicle.
Joint technology
is usable on any sand textures, dirt on surfaces and oil
pollutionPollution is the introduction of contaminants into an environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms . Pollution can take the form of chemical substances, or energy, such as noise, heat, or light...
.
When working with this method, the pick-up of the vehicle adjusts to sand conditions and takes up the top layers of the sand. This procedure is of high cleaning speed and high area efficiency, especially for cleaning up lumps of oil and the removal of
seaweedSeaweedSeaweed has antioxidents. Is a loose colloquial term encompassing macroscopic, multicellular, benthic marine algae. The term includes some members of the red, brown and green algae...
.
Areas of operation
On the
Gold Coast, QueenslandThe Gold Coast is a city in the southeast corner of Queensland, Australia. It is the second most populous city in the state and the sixth most populous city in the country. It is also the most populous non-capital city in the country...
, Australia, four beach cleaner tractors operate 365 days a year. The machines start at midnight and sweep the entire mainland coast (36km). Each night the
strandlineThe strandline, or high water mark, is the area at the top of a beach where debris is deposited. Where there are tides, this line is formed by the highest position of the tide, and moves up and down the beach on a fortnightly cycle
is removed from every beach for the entire 36km of the mainland. Areas where there are flags for swimming are swept from the waterline to the duneline every single morning. Other parts of the upper recreational beach are swept between the duneline and waterline between once a week and once a month depending on the popularity of that beach area. The beach cleaner is a
conethumb|250px|right|A right circular cone and an oblique circular coneA cone is a three-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a flat, round base to a point called the apex or vertex...
-shaped
sieveIn general, a sieve separates wanted/desired/needed elements from unwanted material using a tool such as a mesh, net or other filtration or distillation methods, but it is also used for classification of powders by particle size, or for size measurement as an analytical technique. The word "sift"...
that picks up 150 millimeters of the sand surface and removes
debrisDebris is a word used to describe the remains of something that has been otherwise destroyed. The singular form of debris is debris.Depending on context, debris can refer to a number of different things.- Geological :...
down to cigarette sized impurities. The sieves are pulled by tractors. The machines remove 31 tonnes of debris from beaches in an average week. These beaches receive ten million visitors each year. The beach cleaning tractors also have a program to sweep sandy beaches along the Gold Coast's tidal waterways and the
Gold Coast BroadwaterThe Gold Coast Broadwater, also known as Southport Broadwater and Gold Coast Harbour, is a large shallow estuary of water reaching from the locality of Southport to the southern section of the World Heritage Listed Moreton Bay along the eastern coast of Australia...
.