So far, it's going well. I've begun to 'cheat' (!) less as I am running out of the things that I already had in the cupboard that were wrapped in plastic. I've lost weight too, not a motive for doing this challenge, but an obvious side effect I suppose when you consider that cutting out plastic pretty much alleviates any junk food from your diet. I am a total crisp fiend usually!
Thursday night I did a beach clean. One girl, just over one hour, a small patch of beach and a whole lot of plastic crap and other litter. I was surprised at the volume of stuff I found in this short amount of time. On the Friday night, I sorted it all. Here's a photo:
Apologies for the bad lighting; by the time I finished it was late and two episodes of Sherlock Holmes had passed by. Martin Freeman...*sigh*...oh, I digress!
So, what was this haul made up of?
The most numerous items were (number of pieces in brackets)
Cigarette Butts (78)
Fragments of Foam / Polystyrene (30) - various sources
Lids (27) - mainly screw tops from drink bottles
Straws and straw wrappers (19)
Lollipop sticks (19)
Bits of rope (19)
Fishing line (10)
The quantity of line and rope is in keeping with the worldwide issue of abandoned or lost fishing equipment. These items are a huge contributing factor to marine debris and are responsible for the death of millions of marine animals due to entanglement. World Animal Protection state that 640,000 tonnes of this 'ghost gear' as it is called is left in the oceans each year. Their current Sea Change campaign is seeking to tackle this, along with many other organisations such as ghostfishing and the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. If you need some inspiration do something about ghost gear, watch this incredibly moving video of the rescue of a young humpback whale. Then go forth, oh compassionate people, and campaign against fishing methods that use huge nets like trawling and campaign for more regulation on the dumping of this gear out at sea!
Plastic straws are one of the top ten globally recorded items of marine litter. Over six million straws and drinks stirrers have been collected in beach cleans over the past 25 years (source: Be Straw Free). These are a completely unnecessary single use item that all of us can live without. Next time you get a drink in a bar, say no to straws and stirrers! If you really want to use them get reusable ones like this pretty stirrer (Yes, £22.00 may be a lot for a stirrer, but if you actually drink enough cocktails to warrant needing one in your life then I will assume you can afford to shell out for it) or this stainless steel straw.
The lids were mainly from water bottles. In my opinion, buying bottled water is completely ridiculous when you live in a country with highly monitored, sanitary drinking water (Yep, even with the flouride). I want to give bottled water its own post so I don't want to dwell on it too much here, but if you can't kick the bottled water habit, go for a glass bottled variety and recycle it.
The foam and polystyrene was mainly in little pieces and some were hard to identify. However, from the colour and shape of some pieces, it seemed that they were parts of balls; the kind people might play with with their dogs. Other pieces seemed likely to have come from polystyrene cups or packaging like fish and chip trays.
But the reigning champion of beach litter was the cigarette butt. Here they are, all 78 of them. Completely gross and stinking.
Smokers, answer me this: would you throw a crisp packet on the floor? Or a drinks can? If the answer is no, as it should be, why throw a cigarette butt on the floor? It is litter, and toxic litter at that, containing chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic. Upon entering the sea, these chemicals pass into the water, affecting marine life. They are also hazardous to land animals. Your one cigarette may not seem such a big deal, but there are millions of other people littering cigarette butts too. Cellulose acetate that they are made of takes 12 years to break down. They are disgusting. They belong in a bin! Put them out underfoot if you must, but then please pick them up. I love Surfers Against Sewage's brilliantly named No Butts on the Beach campaign, but also urge you not to leave your butt anywhere outdoors! (Tee hee) That goes for filters and cigarette packets too. An estimated 6,750 million cigarette butts are dropped on the streets of London each year; the money spent cleaning up after this habit could be put to so much better use!
I also found lots of these little plastic pieces:
And some balloon litter:
Please don't ever release balloons (or Chinese lanterns); what goes up must come down, and when they come down these items are litter. The organisation balloons blow has lots of information about this issue. The amount of balloon litter they have collected has to be seen to be believed. Wildlife can fall victim to balloons, mistaking them for food or getting tangled in the strings, which is often fatal ( as was the case for this Razorbill):
After starting a monthly donation to Amnesty International I found out they do balloon releases. Having talked to them about it, with no sign of them stopping I will be cancelling my support and choosing a human rights group that act more responsibly towards the environment.
So there you have it, the analysis of my beach clean. If you use any of these items hope you feel inspired to change your habits, moving away from the single use plastic mentioned in this blog post towards better, reusable alternatives where possible, avoiding altogether where alternatives do not exist.
The alternative to smoking is of course not smoking, but taking into account that giving up can be a very hard thing to do, and you may not want to give up, for the time being at least make sure your butts go in the bin! Thank you :)
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| Photo from Surfer Against Sewage |
