Before Earth Day tomorrow, environmental campaigners and students came together over the weekend at the nation’s beaches to pick up garbage and litter, while calling on the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to introduce policies to curb pollution.

About 60 students and teachers at the National Magong High School on Sunday launched a beach-cleaning event at Longmen Beach in Husi Township (湖溪) in Penghu County, filling 50 bags of trash.

High-school Office of Student Affairs director Fang Chung-chen (方崇真) said the students organized the event on their own initiative in the hopes of restoring the white sandy beach and revealing Penghu’s charms to tourists, adding that the event was good practice for the students’ organizational skills.

The activity was carried out in the form of a contest and members of the team that cleared the most trash were each given a prize sponsored by the office, Fang said.

He added that the waste collected on Sunday included fishnets and other fishing tools carried ashore by waves propelled by the northeastern monsoon.

He said the garbage was centralized and sorted into labeled bags to inform Husi Township Office workers of their contents.

Environmentalist and National Chung Hua University academic Huang Huan-chan (黃煥彰) on the same day led about 120 participants in an event to clean up garbage littered along a Tainan beach known as Siaomeijun (小美軍).

The participants included parents and children, businesspeople and his students, Huang said.

The most common waste found on the beach was plastic — bags, straws and bottles, as well as medical waste, such as needles and drip chambers — followed by polystyrene foam used to make oyster racks float, he said.

Both materials break into tiny bits that can be swallowed by marine animals, harming their health.

He said that Styrofoam — one type of polystyrene foam — is worse than plastic because it disintegrates into tiny bits mixed into sand, making it almost impossible to eradicate.

The participants collected 136 plastic bottles, 82 cartons, 78 glass bottles and 40 Styrofoam cups.

He said that thanks to years of campaigning by environmentalists, Tainan in 2013 banned the use of Styrofoam cups, despite vehement protests by beverage shops.

He urged the EPA to formulate a rule to ban Styrofoam in the nation’s fishing industry.

Meanwhile, an event launched by Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation director Lai Wei-jen (賴威任) on Saturday last week saw about 100 participants pick up 210kg of garbage on the southern shore of the Hualien River and at the Hualien Harbor.

The Hualien event found excessive numbers of dark-colored glass bottles for energy drinks, apparently left behind by fishermen harvesting eel fry near the river’s estuary all night.

He said his foundation would meet with the Hualien District Fishermen’s Union this week to negotiate an agreement with local fishermen that they should not cause pollution while working, adding that the foundation is willing to provide trash cans or garbage bags if it helps to keep Hualien County’s shoreline clean.

Lai said that bottles of energy drinks do not apply to the reward mechanism established by the EPA — whereby people who recycle beer bottles are reimbursed NT$2 — because energy drinks are categorized as medicines.

He called on the EPA to introduce a policy that would include glass bottles in the reward mechanism as an incentive for people not to litter.