Starting from the 30th of November in 2023, Branksome Hall Asia initiated a meaningful endeavor by adopting Sagye Beach on Jeju Island as a companion beach to care for, support, and broaden the view of students by cleaning and taking care of the beach.

On the morning of November 30th, at 9:00 AM, the 20 Haenyeos, local representatives, and fishermen welcomed all the Branksome Hall Asia students that arrived at Sagye beach on the Sagye Port all held hands and welcomed the Branksome students to clean up the Sagye beach.

The locals along the Sagye beach, who were accustomed to the practice of “plogging” happily greeted the 83 grade 11 students and 10 faculty members who came from Seogwipo city.

Prior to commencing the cleanup of Sagye Beach, the students were told simple rules to clean by the organization called Ploving Korea NGO.

After hearing the rules from the organization, the faculty members and students split up freely for 1 hour and 30 minutes and collected up to 7 large trash bags with a total weight of 39.4 kilograms.

Despite its apparent simplicity, the beach companion program is more complex than it seems.

The Beach Companion Program originated in 1986 in Texas from the most basic concerns of exponentially increasing statistics of marine debris, a long-term solution program.

The program’s procedure is benchmarking a certain beach and reinterpreting the program set to the country that made companions of beaches from companies or organizations love and care for the beach that they adopted.

The organization’s scale has the potential to grow from a small group of students undergoing an extracurricular program, to an actual company, or even schools.

As the organization or an individual signs up to adopt or be a companion of a beach near one’s residence domain, the person or organizations who signed up for being a company for the beach are responsible for taking care of it by picking up trash.

The students in Branksome Hall Asia of various grade levels visit Sagye Beach at random time periods to clean up the beaches with different grade levels.

The most recent grade level that cleaned the Sagye Beach was the whole 9th graders and advisors on the 20th of February.

From the beach cleanup project, the grade 9 students were able to walk along Sagye Beach and pick up any debris left on the beach they saw.

And the major portion of the debris left on the beach were curbstones, or the leftover parts of burnt cigarettes.

A few students were able to collect styrofoam boxes, beverage bottles, ripped swimming tubes, broken umbrellas, plastic bags, and many other kinds of marine debris spotted on the beach on the way walking on the Sagye trail.

Taking care of the beach can be a big action even if it is a time-consuming process for each and every individual, but if the small steps all come together, it will make a huge step to combating the effects of climate change.

Seoyeun Kim

Grade 9

Branksome Hall Asia