Sunday 22nd September 2019

Many thanks to everyone who turned up on this rainy Sunday morning to clean the beach at Half Moon Bay. It was certainly not a promising start and we were all wet before the beach clean began. However, the rain eventually stopped and 37 volunteers cleaned the beach and carried out a survey of the litter we collected.

In total we collected just under 14kg of which there was a high percentage of small plastic pieces, bits of glass (still sharp) and some bagged dog poo! Also a variety of other items including fishing line, rope and food packaging.

The autumn magazine from MCS has an article about 25 years of beach cleaning and surveying. It seems that marine litter is still going up and we know that small, broken down bits of plastic are highly toxic to marine life as they can be ingested and travel up the food chain.

Some of our recent beach cleans at Half Moon Bay have yielded low weights and volumes of collected litter. However, if we are removing these dangerous pieces of plastic then we must be protecting some of our local marine life and the creatures further up the food chain, including ourselves!

So, please keep joining us on our beach cleans and surveys. The next one is Sunday 1st December at 10:00 am.

Kathy MacAdam