My first beach clean

I live in North Wales and one of my favourite coastlines is Trearddur bay. I had a spare morning so I grabbed a couple of buckets, jumped in the car and headed over to one of the beaches. This was my first beach clean so I had no idea how long it would take to fill a bucket.

The first thing I noticed was how clean the beach looked. It was nothing like the posts i had seen about clean ups on social media. Those posts had looked very obviously littered with plastic and invoked a level of disgust. This beach actually looked quite pleasant. I was starting to worry that I didn’t have a call to answer here.

I started picking up the pieces, a bottle top here, a small shard there and dropped them in to my (what now seemed oversized) bucket. The more my eye become trained in, the more colour I noticed and it suddenly hit me. The beach is loaded with plastic its just the vast majority is at a size that is typically unnoticeable. As a followed the stand line kicking over seaweed, more and more little specs of colour came in to view. It’s like my eyes were finally open, I was peering in to a dimension that I didn’t know existed. 

As my bucket began to fill, it couldn’t help think that I wasn’t alone with my initial interpretation. I’m certain that countless dog walkers and concerned locals had probably cleared alway many of the large noticeable pieces over the years but like me had passed over the tiny specs. I became curious to see how much I could find in the little time I had allowed

Within two and a half hours I had filled the two buckets that I had brought. Admittedly it wasn’t all tiny specs. Once I got in to the swing of things I found a lot of rope and large fragments of container that become well camouflaged in the seaweed

I brought my buckets home, emptied them out and decided to sort the items. I knew it was only a small sample but I wondered if any anecdotal conclusions could be drawn from what I had found.

I created the following categories 

• Fishing/boating rope
• Fishing line
• Industrial/maintenance
• Toys
• Bottles
• Bottle tops
• Bags
• Hygiene products
• Straws and ear buds
• Containers
• Large shards
• Medium shards
• Small shards

Given the quantities of plastic within these categories I came up with the following categories.

The biggest category by weight was plastic fishing/boating ropes followed by industrial/Maintenance. This suggests careless fishermen and/or possibly oil rig workers who don’t collect up their rope or cable clippings. Wether the problem relates to a greater amount of waste being generated or simply more of it being thrown away I simply can’t say, but I certainly didn’t expect this category to be the biggest contributor. The answer here has to be policy and/or best practices brought in at a corporate level to help manage waste loss from ships and rigs

A more predictable finding was the likes of bottles, bottle tops, straws, containers and toys. This suggests the tourist industry with families visiting the beach in the summer months. Some of these items could have found their way here from land fills but the pattern does suggest tourism. What is interesting is the number of plastic bottle fragments less then a few centimetres across. For this level of  fragmentation the bottles must have been travelling in the ocean for some time meaning they are unlikely to be local. A good solution might be better waste facilities at the beach side as I noticed there were currently very little

Hygiene products needs a special mention because the most numerous item found by far was cotton bud cues. This item represents the biggest pound-for-pound plastic contributor in the collection. In my two and a half hour cleanup I found close to a whole pack. It makes sense because by habit this type of item tends to be flushed down the toilet rather than find the recycle bin meaning it’s highly likely to enter the ocean. The vast majority of them found are the blue ones used by Johnson and Johnson and I’m glad to hear they have recently changed their cues to paper.

The number of large/medium/small shards are naturally worrying because these pieces tend to to be eaten by seabirds and are often found within the stomachs of dead individuals. what’s clear is that these pieces are weathered. They have probably been in circulation for years so I’m glad I had the opportunity to finally get them off the menu. Also amongst the small shards were great number of nurdles which I didn’t expect to find here.

What’s perhaps the most worrying conclusion is the lack of micro-plastics found. (5mm or less) This is probably because they are too small for the eye or hidden within the sand particles. They may also stay within the water column or the vast majority may have already been consumed by sea life. This highlights to me the problem with micro-plastics. Once a plastic item has broken-up to this level the damage is already done. Micro-plastics cannot be taken from the ocean because they cannot be found. They are simply destined for the food chain on a one way ticket.

Final Thoughts 

What I found on the beach was telling, but that which I did not find was even more telling. Most items I found sat in the range of about 10cm and 1cm in diameter. Things larger and smaller than this were absent. 

The very large I concluded may be absent because it is noticeable. For the reason that it attracts attention it is likely ‘dealt with’ at the point of wastage (it gets in to the recycling system) or it is noticed after wastage and collected by rubbish collectors like me

The very small is likely absent for the exact opposite reasons. It hasn’t been noticed. Pieces of plastic that have been allowed to break up to such small sizes that they have passed out of the human dimension and in to the realms of the microscopic.  

My final thought is that the longer a peice of plastic circulates in this world the more damage it can do because the more likely it will escape our attention. This problem is made worse because it passes from our attention in to the attention of smaller and smaller animals. The 10-1cm shards that I was finding are exactly the size that have been found in the stomachs of Dead Sea birds. In a nut shell - we do not find them but sea birds do.

Plastic pieces that avoid the attention of birds circulate long enough to break up even further in to micro-particles and enter the attention span of micro-organisms. This is the point where they enter the food chain to which we sit above. 

What’s the answer?

Although recycling and beach-cleaning are important for the management of the crisis they are far from being effective solutions in isolation. My beach-clean was only able to remove a very small fraction of what was present on one beach and the volumes I removed were probably replenished by the tide.  It’s also true to say that recycling is very limited with only 9% of plastic waste getting made in to new plastics. 

If plastic really does more harm the longer it is in circulation then the answer is to prevent it getting in to circulation in the first place. We all must do what we can to reduce our plastic consumption and break the supply demand cycle that society is currently stuck in. 

The next steps are to scale the survey up and apply greater scientific principle to what I am satisfied to call a good start.