Plastic still litters our beaches, says clean up group

Plastic still litters our beaches although the number of carrier bags left on the seashore has fallen by 80 per cent over the past decade, according to the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).

The society said that charges for single-use carrier bags had had a positive result and urged the government to bring in deposit schemes for drinks containers to boost recycling rates.

It said that 9 out of 10 items of beach litter were plastic and drink-related litter – bottles, cans and lids – were found on 97 per cent of Britain’s beaches in clean ups last year.

The charity runs the Great British Beach Clean each September, with the surveys from volunteers contributing a third of the data it gathers on litter on beaches.

The MCS said that its beach clean programme had recorded an average drop of 80 per cent in the number of plastic bags found in 100 metres of beach over the past 10 years.

It hopes to find less litter such as single-use plastic cutlery, polystyrene cups, balloon sticks and food containers on beaches after bans in England, Wales and Scotland over the past two years.

But the prevalence of drink containers, such as bottles and cans and their lids, prompted the charity to renew calls for a workable deposit scheme.

Yesterday (Monday 29 July), Hove comedian Zoe Lyons, an ambassador for the charity, helped the start the build up to this year’s Great British Beach Clean with campaigners and volunteers in Brighton.

She said that she was “so lucky to live by the sea” and enjoyed the beach every day but said she was aware of how it was “used and misused” every day.

The MCS survey, which has been running since 1994, involves volunteers recording all the litter that they find along a 100-metre stretch of beach.

Even on the beach at Brighton, which is regularly cleaned, volunteers were picking up rubbish including drink lids and bottle caps, plastic packaging, tissues and clothing.

The comedian and presenter, who has taken part in a number of beach cleans, said that people could make a difference by getting involved.

She said: “It is a very tiny act of making a positive environmental impact. It’s a very small thing that hopefully, visually, you can see it makes an impact.

“But, also, I think in a world where people just feel overwhelmed by a lot of it, there’s a lot of bad news, a lot of environmental doom and gloom, to the point where people get environmental fatigue.

“So just doing a small act just breaks through that feeling of hopelessness.”

She also said that the public could push governments and supermarkets to do better on reducing waste by, for example, not using excess packaging.

She said: “I’m sick of buying cucumbers that are packaged in their own anoraks. They don’t need anoraks. They’re cucumbers. Or two avocados in their own little kayak.”

And she urged the government to hold water companies to account to tackle the sewage crisis affecting Britain’s coasts and waters.

She said: “Five years ago this was a blue flag beach. You’d never think of checking an app before you went for a dip. Now you’re doing a turd count. This is a developed country and it’s just not on.”

MCS beachwatch manager Lizzie Price said that part of the value of the data gathered by beach cleans was the way that it could highlight “hotspots” of rubbish to help drive action.

For instance, clusters of items such as period products, wet wipes and cotton bud sticks could show where untreated sewage pollution was a particular problem.

These could show up any time as the charity runs beach-cleaning initiative all year round, with the Great British Beach Clean bringing the work into focus.

She said: “Collecting the data every single time is really vital for us to push for change – and having that robust legacy of data for 30 years now means we can really explain the problem.

“We’ve seen an 80 per cent drop in plastic bags on our beaches and we’re now starting to see a drop in plastic cotton bud sticks, a drop in cutlery.

“The policies they’ve put in are starting to see a positive effect in the reduction on our beaches.

“It allows us to then say these work and now there’s other single-use items that we’re finding that we also want to see change to – things like drinks litter.”

She said that the MCS wanted the deposit return scheme – which has a planned introduction date of 2027 – to be implemented and to include glass bottles.

These, she said, were “incredibly harmful to humans when they break down but also harmful to the marine life as well out there”.

She added: “We must move quicker towards a society that repairs, reuses and recycles.”

More than 100 beach cleans have already been organised to take place across the country during the Great British Beach Clean from Bude in Cornwall to Aikerness in the Orkney Islands.

The beach clean, which is sponsored by Cully and Sully Soup, runs from Friday 20 September to Sunday 29 September.

To find out more, visit www.mcsuk.org/beach-cleans.