5 days ago
I spent the weekend beach-cleaning in Dumfries and Galloway
I'm spending the weekend beach-cleaning with People Against Plastic Pollution (PAPP), a small charity set up in 2021 after its founder Will Thorpe – an environmental consultant from Devon – visited the Western Isles and was dismayed to find beaches there strewn with rubbish.
Glance at the beach at Port William in Dumfries and Galloway and you would have no idea of the scale of plastic pollution on it, and within it.
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But take a closer look and you will find plastic almost everywhere – embedded into the soil, trapped between stones, forming habitats for wildlife including slow worms, voles and ants.
They are living under fishing crates and giant drums, but we're here to clear as much plastic as we possibly can from this hard-to-reach part of the coastline before it becomes too brittle to deal with at all. The creatures scamper and slither away to find alternative refuge in the thick vegetation.
At last summer's clean-up there were a dozen volunteers, but this year it turns out to be just Will and his determined colleague (also called Will), until my arrival boosts the squad by 50%.
I'm here on Saturday under my own steam and on Sunday using volunteering leave offered by The National's publisher, Newsquest. Assisting two Englishmen to clean up a Scottish beach certainly seems to fit with the goal of delivering a positive impact on the local community.
We may be small in number, but we have the resolve of a much bigger team. Many hands make light work, but so does a brand-new 518cc quad bike loaned to the group by Honda UK, which we use to repeatedly tow a trailer piled high with hundreds of kilogrammes of plastic.
Last year the group had to drag everything they collected along the beach, but we're able to load up a trailer, tow it up the road and hurl it into a huge skip provided by Dumfries and Galloway Council.
Not until we have weighed it, though – the charity pledges to collect 2kg for every £1 donated, so we keep track of every load and set ourselves ever-increasing targets.
We spend hours hauling huge trays and barrels we've stuffed full of boxes, bottles, fishing rope and much more, and what starts out feeling like a losing battle becomes more satisfying with every weigh-in.
The clean-up is enlivened by the discovery of some 'treasure', including a doll's head with no eyes, a message in a bottle (about how to find Jesus) and a cheerful yellow duck printed with 'World Record Duck Race – Ireland 2006'.
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Some investigation reveals that this was one of a number of escapees from that fundraising event, set loose from the River Liffey by some mischievous children. It clearly wasn't the strongest swimmer of the raft, as others reached Sweden and Holland.
On day two I remark that it was interesting to find so many bottles with liquid in them and the lids screwed shut. 'Have you ever seen the inside of a fishing boat?' asked Will T. 'They're probably all full of pee'.
I pause to contemplate the fact that he had neglected to mention this to me 24 hours earlier, when I was diligently emptying out the contents of these sealed bottles to ensure we were weighing only the plastic, not liquid too.
Undeterred, however, I keep doing so, reasoning that human pee was probably less of a threat to my health than the near-infinite number of microplastics to which each of us is exposed daily.
So every kilogramme of our grand total of 1.4 tonnes was plastic. Returning to my desk, it felt serendipitous to find an email from Yes West Lothian about its community litter pick this coming Saturday (starting at 10am at The Lanthorn, Dedridge).
Imagine the impact if every Yes group in Scotland did the same, for just one day this summer – a win-win for the environment and the cause.
I'm already looking forward to next summer's PAPP mission. If you're averse to rodents, spiders, legless lizards and/or handling urine, then this might not be the activity for you.
But really the most disturbing thing is getting a glimpse of how much plastic, in various states of degradation, is in our oceans, on our beaches and in our environment – to witness how solid objects break down into tiny fragments too small to collect or contain.
Microplastics are being found in rapidly increasing concentrations in human bodies, including in the liver, kidney and especially the brain.
It really is a race against time to remove what's there, while taking action to prevent more being added. I certainly won't look at a single-use plastic bottle the same way again.
