England is surrounded by water, so 70% of anything that goes down the drains (tampons, condoms, wet wipes) or up in the air (balloons, fire lanterns) lands in the sea. So we have huge amounts of beach litter, as well as well in the sea itself (mostly plastic and ghost fishing waste). 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 etc
Bags to Pick Up Beach Litter
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 have to up tin cans etc with your hands.
- Ask your council to install a marine clean station.
- Register at Surfers Against Sewage or Beach Clean
- Check tide times and order thick gloves/sharps boxes.
- Download a beach clean guide
- Order a public liability certificate.
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).
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.
Use with beach litter clean-up kits and knives from a social enterprise where you can report fishing waste (it’s collected by volunteers to make into sunglasses (sustainable sailors apt to dropping them off boats are best choosing biodegradable sunglasses instead).
Report trapped marine creatures to British Divers Marine Life Rescue.
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, but 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.
How Oil & Litter Impacts Birds Worldwide
Everything travels in the sea, so if we drop litter in England, it could well end up elsewhere. And since 70% of our planet is sea, anything released (like balloons or fire lanterns) has a 70% chance of landing in the oceans.
As an example of how oil, litter (and over-fishing) is affecting birds worldwide:
Pelicans are unique birds with big bills with giant pouches, to catch several fish at once. There are 8 species worldwide, and all are some of the largest birds on earth. Whereas most birds have one toe facing backwards, all the webbed toes of pelicans face forward, which is why they swim well but walk clumsily on land. They also have huge wingspans, so fly well.
Pelicans feed their chicks up to 30 times a day, so it’s important that their habitats have good fish stocks. Other threats to pelicans are hunting, but mostly habitat loss, fishing waste and oil pollution.
In May 2024, hundreds of emaciated pelicans were found on the Californian coast, found to be anaemic and dehydrated. A non-profit took them into care, and found that around 40% of the pelicans also had injuries from fishing line and hooks.
Marine biologists were at a loss to know why the birds were starving, due to there plenty of fish in the sea. They now think it’s due to rising sea temperatures, which is causing some fish to move, so pelicans cannot die deep enough to find them, and surface waves also obscure the visibility of pelicans being able to see their natural food.
Volunteers worldwide are also rescuing pelicans covered in oil from spills, then rehabilitating them, before releasing them back into the ocean. Which is why it’s important to keep them clean, so the same doesn’t happen again.
How to Help Pelicans (thousands of miles away)
Even in England, we can help pelicans by switching from everything made with oil. Not just fossil fuels, but also moving away from synthetic fabrics (polyester and nylon) and anything plastic (also made from oil).
Don’t use driveway or supermarket car washes (just use a waterless car wash, to avoid mini oil-spills that travel the planet.
A Book to Help Clean and Protect Our Seas
What The Wild Sea Can Be is an award-winning and passionate book on the issues with the oceans of the world, and what can be done to save them. This bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of our seas begins with a fascinating deep history, showing how prehistoric ocean ecology, holds lessons for the ocean of today.
In elegant prose, the author takes us into the realms of creatures that current face challenging conditions – from Emperor penguins to sharks and orcas. Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain.
In the form of highly-protected ocean sanctuaries (owned by no-one, so nobody is allowed to sail or or fish there) and the regeneration of seagrass meadows (vital for endangered sea turtles) and giant kelp forests (along with efforts to protect endangered coral reefs).
The book offers innovative ideas to protect coastlines and clean up seas, which combined with preventing over-fishing and deep-sea mining, could mean better oceans for all creatures, are just around the corner.
Helen is not afraid to spell out what we stand to lose, if we don’t change our ways, and it is terrifying. This is a book of love and urgency and sense. Keggie Carew
Dr Helen Scales is a marine biologist, who writes for National Geographic Magazine, teaches at Cambridge University and is a storytelling ambassador for the Save Our Seas Foundation. She lives between Cambridge and the wild Atlantic coast of France.