Plastic promise: Emily Stevenson of Beach Guardian. She wore a dress made of crisp packets when she graduated as a marine biologist. Photograph: SWNS Pollution Pick up the pieces: the battle to clean up Cornwall’s beaches Plastic pollution blights the Cornish coast, but local people are tackling the problem

“Harriet is a womble,” her mother, Sophie Orme, says. “Now, wherever she goes, she automatically picks up litter and hands it to me.” The two are spending their morning, like countless mornings before, litter-picking on their nearest beach. In their home town of Portreath, with a population of around 1,400 permanent residents, environmental custodianship is catching on. “It’s becoming the culture of the whole village. From the village elders right down to the youngest kids. Even the local pub runs nightly beach cleans in the summer,” Orme says. The area’s social values, she believes, are changing, much like when smoking became taboo. “You become a pariah if you litter,” she says.

“Litter was always a part of my childhood in north Cornwall,” says 24-year-old Emily Stevenson. “We would build sandcastles out of plastic.” Although she and her father, Rob Stevenson, often carried out impromptu beach cleans, it was not until 2017 that they held their first community clean. But after a serendipitous moment made headlines – when Emily unearthed an empty packet of crisps from 1997, the same year she was born, it led to her wearing a graduation dress made from crisp packets that was widely reported – numbers of volunteers “exploded”. The duo formed the social enterprise Beach Guardian, and have since spent thousands of hours scouring various cliffs and coves in more than 200 beach cleans.

Beach Guardian focuses its efforts on the seven bays between Newquay and Padstow, two of the county’s most well-trodden holiday destinations. This stretch of coastline is Rick Stein territory – the whimsical Cornwall of foraging in hedgerows, steaming mussels and stargazy pie – or at least as television would have you believe. But in the dead of winter, when country lanes are quiet and the long swathes of sand are no longer cluttered by windbreakers, beach towels and body boards, bands of locals come to the beach on the hunt for rubbish.

Around 5,000 items of marine plastic pollution exist for each mile of beach in the UK, according to the Marine Conservation Society. And, living in the county with the largest coastline (422 miles), it is no surprise that the Cornish are deeply invested in their surroundings. Fishermen’s kisses, nurdles and biobeads – special names for fragments of fishing nets and small plastic pellets – are part of the vernacular, recognised by locals as devastating to marine life. It can be an uphill battle when you realise the “unquantifiable” amount of microplastics in the ocean, Stevenson acknowledges. This doesn’t deter the most dedicated volunteers, who pass kitchen sieves over the sand, scouting for plastic flecks of colour.

On the beach, a mother holds open a bag for her child, who runs back and forth, gleefully adding “juicy bits of plastic” to a bulging pile. “Once you start seeing it, you can’t not see it again,” Zoe Collis says. “By coming here you see the scale and complexity of the problem. It means when you go home you then start thinking, right, what do I not need? Do I need that plastic bottle of water? Probably not.”

Beach cleans became a vital way for her family to integrate after they relocated from Staffordshire to Cornwall six years ago. “You start seeing the same faces. And you find out other things going on. It’s been a great way of finding a group of buddies and building a community,” she says. During the long days of the pandemic, regular cleans were a lifeline for families like hers. Especially at Christmas, as Omicron torpedoed festive plans, beach cleans provided a welcome escape. “We had hot chocolate and mince pies afterwards. It was something to do to get out of the house that felt safe,” Collis adds.

Opening his palm, Pendlebury reveals four pieces of Lego, salvaged from a cargo spill. In 1997 more than 4.8m pieces of Lego bound for New York were lost at sea and are still washing up on Cornish beaches today. Among the pieces Pendlebury finds are a canary-yellow surfboard and a teal, thumb-sized figurine, which vaguely resembles an elephant, or perhaps a hippo. It’s tricky to tell as the bricks are slightly misshapen, their trademark bumps licked by waves until rounded. Such items are considered collectibles by avid beachcombers: the rare bits of junk that find their way to the shores from exotic places or decades past.

Of course, front rooms and garden sheds can’t hold everything the cleaners find. Instead, Beach Guardian’s plastic bounty is used for educational purposes – as art activism. A statement from the group says: “Everything from our beach cleans is brought up to our Beach Guardian Lab. Volunteers sort through what we have. The large items like nets and rope are used for large art installations like our whale, giant puppets and our Plastic Age stone circle. The smaller items are used for school resources so that pupils can see first-hand what we are finding on our beach cleans and watch our Tune In Tuesday videos on YouTube.”

Beach Guardian is also pushing for policy change, starting with local authorities and businesses, through to politicians and multinational corporations. The team has met decision-makers from parliament and PepsiCo, to present the dangers of plastic in our ecosystem. Stevenson uses an analogy: “If you have a leaky sink in your bathroom, you wouldn’t spend year after year mopping up the floor; you’d fix the tap. Beach cleaning is mopping up the floor, but we’ll do that forever unless we turn off the plastic tap.”

“​​It’s horrendous in the summer. We literally fill up black bags with barbecue rubbish, crisp packets, plastic spades, all sorts. When the bins are full, people just throw rubbish on the floor,” he says. According to Wood, fires cause some of the worst damage. Last year was particularly dire, with wooden chairs and tables stolen from the forecourt of a hotel used as fuel in the name of a good time. “I wish they could see it now when we’re picking mainly old stuff and fishing gear, so they could see the difference in the summer,” he says.

Beach cleaners are encouraged to share photos under the hashtag 2minutebeachclean. After the first station was installed in Bude, Cornwall, Dorey measured a 68% drop in litter left on the beach that year. Fifteen years later, with hashtags registered as far as Antarctica, the scale of the charity’s work is harder to track. “It’s the key that unlocks laziness. Two minutes is nothing; everybody’s got two minutes,” says Dorey. By setting an achievable goal people are inspired to make incremental changes. “We don’t need 100 perfect people – we need everybody to be imperfect, but at least trying,” he adds.

Source: The Guardian

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