Welcome to the new APPA website
Welcome to the APPA. We want to share our story with you about how and why we decided to create the APPA and what we have been doing behind the scenes to get this little organisation up and running.
Discussions about the need for a group like APPA first surfaced at the initial public meeting of The PURE Tour, which involved some of APPA’s founding members (and others), on 4 February 2018 at Sustainable Coastlines Flagship in Auckland. A month later, at the 6th International Marine Debris Conference held in San Diego in March 2018, the need for a NZ-based plastic pollution group was raised again. Representing a diverse range of backgrounds and specialties, we shared one common goal: work on mitigating and future prevention of marine plastics in Aotearoa.
After some initial calls and many more emails with a growing group of dedicated individuals, a workshop was held in Raglan to flesh out the framework and basis for a professional and legal entity. From there on we developed into an organised group with a board and an executive committee.
We hold monthly calls, resulting in regular member updates, support for various campaigns, letters to the government and private industry as well as the enabling of countless connections between and beyond our membership. We have hosted international scholars and yielded questions from marine debris networks in other geographies.
While the organisation is still in its infancy, the need and value of the collaborative efforts are already clearly paying off.
As marine debris is an issue that does not stop at a nation’s coast, New Zealand also joined an international group of marine debris network hubs, as described by Kandiziora et al 2019
