Colombo Court Blog Sustainability
Beach clean-ups on World Environment Day
Two years running, our team have spent the morning of World Environment Day on a Colombo beach with sacks and gloves. What we found, and why we keep going back.
World Environment Day is 5 June, and for the last two years it has meant an early start for most of our team. In 2023 we cleaned a stretch of the Mount Lavinia shoreline; in 2024 it was Wellawatta beach, a little closer to the hotel. Both times we filled more sacks than we expected, and both times members of the public put down their morning walk and joined in without being asked.
What we found
More than half of what we collected, by volume, was single-use plastic and glass bottles. The rest was the usual: food wrappers, fishing line, polystyrene broken into pieces too small to pick up properly, and a great many flip-flops. Plastic in the sea is not an abstract problem on this coast. It ends up in the fish, on the reefs and on the beaches people swim from, and it does not go away on its own.
Why a hotel does this
We cannot clean the ocean. We can clean a beach for a morning, and we can show a few dozen people that it is worth doing, which is how these things spread. It also keeps us honest about our own plastic. Drinking water at Colombo Court is filtered and bottled in glass on site, which is thousands of bottles a year that do not exist, and waste here is separated so that less of it reaches a landfill or a river.
Next year
We will be back on 5 June, and guests are welcome to join us. Ask at the front office in the week before and we will tell you where and when; gloves and sacks are provided, and breakfast by the pool is waiting afterwards. The rest of what we do for the world beyond our walls is on our sustainability page.
