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He's doing the 'dirty work' to keep plastic out of the ocean
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of CNN News


CNN News, April 17, 2019
Posted: April 20th, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/17/world/cnnheroes-afroz-shah-af...

Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn't had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn't spent this time writing briefs or preparing for court. His mission? Saving the world's oceans from plastic pollution. It's a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. "The whole beach was like a carpet of plastic," he said. "It repulsed me." The unsightly mess Shah had stumbled upon is part of a global environmental crisis. More than 8 million tons of plastic ends up in the world's oceans each year - the equivalent of a garbage truck dumped every minute. It's predicted that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. The results are devastating. More than 1 million seabirds, 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish die from plastic pollution each year. In October 2015, Shah began picking up trash from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began recruiting others to join in. Word spread and ... more volunteers got involved. Shah hasn't stopped since. He's now spent 209 weekends dedicated to this mission, inspiring more than 200,000 volunteers to join him in what's been called the world's biggest beach cleanup. By October 2018, Versova Beach was finally clean and Shah's cleanups expanded to another beach as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India. All told, the movement has cleared more than 60 million pounds of garbage - mostly plastic waste - from Mumbai's beaches and waterways.

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