Project Brupegvideo
Removing 1000 pounds of waste plastic from a Great Barrier Reef beach - Project Brupeg Ep. 425
31 October 2025 · 35 min · 20K views · Coconut Beach, Lizard Island
What this video covers
Brupeg, a rebuilt fishing trawler, accesses Coconut Beach on the south-east side of Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef to remove marine debris from one of the reef's hardest-to-reach beaches.0:57 The beach faces south-east, collects debris driven by prevailing winds, and is boxed in by 60–70-foot cliffs on a 45-degree angle with a fringing reef at the entrance — conditions that prevent commercial vessels from landing.11:19 The crew navigates the dinghy over the reef at high tide with roughly two metres of water, timing runs at first light before temperatures become extreme.3:47 Over two days, the team fills three 1,000-litre hessian sacks — approximately 3,000 litres of plastic by volume — from only half the beach, collecting bottle caps, rope, oil containers, fishing buoys, and buried debris the crew cannot fully excavate due to limited time and storage space aboard Brupeg.15:28 Space aboard the vessel is the primary logistical constraint; the crew cuts rope off bamboo frames to compress volume.17:01 In parallel, the crew conducts a 100-metre drone transect for Tangaroa Blue, flying at 10 metres altitude and 1.5 metres per second to generate imagery fed into a machine learning algorithm that identifies plastics and trains the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) database.19:06 The crew also collects tuna tracker buoys for Tangaroa Blue to repurpose as ghost-net trackers.20:01
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