England’s coastline is beautiful, but it’s almost impossible to take a walk these days, without finding litter of all kinds – dropped by locals or holidaymakers, draining from rivers or washing up from other shores.
Always check tide times and take proper equipment with you, if organising a beach litter clean. It’s best to leave children and dogs at home, for their safety. Read more on keeping dogs safe by the seaside.
Morecambe Bay is renowned for quicksand, read our post on keeping safe near sinking mud.
Don’t walk on sand dunes, to avoid disturbing nests and native wildlife like natterjack toads). Also don’t disturb seals or other marine wildlife.
The Importance of Clean Beaches
Clean beaches are not just good to avoid eyesores and increase tourism income. But to prevent accidents with broken glass for children and dogs.
Birds can mistake shiny wrappers (and even cigarette butts) for food. Seals and dolphins tangle in fishing nets. And microplastics get ingested by all marine creatures (avoid taking ‘recycled plastic’ beach towels to the shore, as the plastics can end up in the ocean.
Don’t remove pebbles, sand or driftwood from beaches, as this can cause coastal erosion.
Seaweed should only be removed by experts using sustainable hand-harvesting methods, to ‘give seaweed a haircut’, without removing the roots. As someone once wrote – it’s seaweed to you, but the universe to a shrimp!
Keep dogs away from seaweed. They like to play with the fronds, but it can expand in the stomach, as it dries.
The Most Common Forms of Beach Litter
The most common items you’ll likely to encounter on the beach are:
- Plastic bottles
- Glass litter
- Cigarette butts (use a personal ashtray)
- The tear-off bits on grocery plastic bags
- Plastic tea bags
- Nylon hair bands
- Crisp packets
- Golf balls and tees (launched from ships)
- Swimming costumes, goggles, snorkels
- Fishing line waste
- Footballs, frisbees (never use near seals)
Tips for a Safe Effective Beach Clean
- Dress in layers, for the English weather!
- Notify the council or land owner (even if you don’t get a reply, it’s good manners).
- Wear safety gloves, and use long-handled litter-pickers to remove needles, nappies, electrical items or chemicals.
- Report anything hazardous to the landowner and council (who can serve litter abatement orders on private land – it has to remove it on public land, no matter who dropped it).
- Cut up disposable face masks, plastic beer rings, rubber bands and hair bands, before safe disposal, to avoid harming wildlife.
- Report fishing nets and ghost fishing gear to Waterhaul (who can arrange collection nationwide, with participating volunteer groups).
- Tangled live creatures should be reported immediately to British Divers Marine Life Rescue (RSPCA and Coastguard can put you through). Don’t approach creatures yourself, you may scare them away.
- Report fly-tipping and dead animals to your local council.
Volunteer Beach Clean Opportunities
You could of course just take your own bag and pick up litter yourself (always good). But if you prefer to get more involved in community efforts, there is plenty of help.
Surfers Against Sewage has the ambition to recruit 1 million volunteers to each clean 10 miles of beach (or canals or parks) each year. You can find a local clean near you.
If you start a local clean-up, you’ll receive free equipment for up to 30 volunteers (along with guidance and public liability insurance). The kit contains gloves, reusable sacks, a first aid kit and hand sanitiser.
Just arrive on time at the meeting point, and receive basic training. Each clean lasts around 2 hours, then you separate items for recycling. This qualifies towards hours on the Duke of Edinburgh volunteer scheme.
Surfers Against Sewage will send you a land owner notification letter to amend yourself, providing details and arranging rubbish collection disposal. Blanket permission has been given by Cornwall Council, so you don’t need to notify them.
Marine Conservation Society also runs beach clean-ups (join one or open a volunteer account, to start one). All pieces of litter are recorded – from lolly sticks to lost toys. This helps to be aware of the main litter types to avoid, in the future.
National Trust cares for almost 800 miles of coastline, and organises volunteer beach cleans. They even run ‘silent disco’ beach cleans (everyone listens to music on their wireless bluetooth headphones!) Recent finds include:
- A washed-up can of Russian bug spray (Suffolk)
- Remnants from a 1980s picnic lunch (Liverpool)
- Sonar equipment from Texas (Northern Ireland)
- Oil-covered digestive biscuits (Devon)
- A headless toy soldier (Whitehaven, Cumbria)
Litter-Picking Kits and Stations
The 2 Minute Foundation offers a litter-picking station for councils or volunteers. Just take a bag and litter-picker, then return when you’re done. It will help set up a fundraiser for your local council, business or school to sponsor one.
Waterhaul beach clean bag is made in Cornwall from end-of-life spinnaker sails, a durable sailcloth that is designed to be used with their litter-pickers. So you don’t end up with tin canned food on your hands!
Use with beach litter-picking equipment and knives from a social enterprise collected by volunteers to make into sunglasses (don’t drop them into the sea, as they are still made from plastic, even if it’s recycled).
Private anglers can use Monomaster, which lets you store fishing gear, until you deposit it in a fishing line recycling station (or send it off).
Volunteer Divers (and Dry Land Sorters!)
Neptune’s Army of Rubbish Cleaners has volunteer divers nationwide, who recover fishing waste to kitchen sinks (which they do find).
If you don’t fancy jumping in the sea with weights attached, it welcomes dry-land volunteers to collect and sort the rubbish for recycling.
As well as often finding (released) live creatures abandoned in crab and lobster pots, it also finds glass bottles, tin cans, spark plugs, umbrellas, golf balls and torch batteries.
Litter-Picking Fishing Boat Volunteers
Fishing for Litter has volunteers worldwide that work on fishing boats. They receive bags to fill up, then return to port for recycling. Any fleet can join up.
So far fleets in England have removed removed hundreds of tonnes of marine litter from our ocean (along with textile and scrap metal, which can be sold for extra income).
Be Wary of Ocean Clean-Up Machines
Ocean-clean-up machines sound good, as they collect floating marine life (‘neuston’) but could be doing more harm than good. As sea plastic is too small to be collected by machines, other creatures may be caught in the operation.
More hopeful solutions are ‘seabins’ that suck up marine trash (but can be almost immediately emptied back in the ocean so wildlife can escape). And ‘Water wheels’ (placed at river ends to move at very slow pace, so creatures/fish can move away in time).
The sentiment is there, but we must be careful to avoid ‘gadgets’ being the answer.
