beach clean

Our beach clean began with a 2 hour drive up the most amazing coastline from Fionnphort to Ulva on the Isle of Mull (having stopped by Beluga II in Tobermory) to meet up with 3 very small local primary schools.

Cath and Janey from Marine Conservation Society arrived just after us, having had the same problems finding this quite beautiful and remote beach, only to find the school kids hard at work - getting stuck in to clearing up the seriously large amount of plastic waste.

With the ebb and flow of the tides, thousands of miles of coastline around the UK testify to the devastation that plastic pollution is having on the marine environment. The oceans are at their choking point, for every mile of beach surveyed there are 159 plastic bottles found washed up.

The New Year’s storms have brought a lurid, unmissable reminder to UK beaches, with thousands of bright pink detergent bottles being churned up by the sea. As waves of highly-visible plastic trash hit British beaches, it’s a timely reminder of a much bigger problem: we are turning our oceans into plastic soup. It’s been estimated recently that about EIGHT MILLION TONNES of plastic ends up in the ocean each year.

Normally you associate Thailand’s beaches and holiday resorts with emerald water and white sands, but on Saturday morning 50,000 litres of crude oil spilled from a leak in a pipeline into the Gulf of Thailand, off Rayong province.