From Bottles to Boardshorts

Very often the only time that I read any of the one newspaper that I buy each week during the winter is when I am tearing it up whilst laying a fire each evening.  This week, one small article in the Saturday Telegraph (not my preferred broadsheet, I must admit) caught my eye, titled “The world is drowning in plastic waste”.  I paused in my fire building and sat back on the lounge floor to read it.

It reported that each year more plastic is being dumped in the oceans than was produced worldwide in the 1960s.  That is the equivalent of five shopping bags full of plastic waste being thrown into the sea for every foot of the world’s coastline.  Shameful, huh? 

The world produced 299 million tons of new plastic last year but a new report by Washington’s Worldwatch Institute claims that in Europe we only recycle a quarter of our plastic waste, burning another third for heat or power.  In the USA less than 10% is recycled.  And what becomes of the rest?  Thrown away.   

Clearly we have a significant problem on our hands, and one that’s true impact has yet to be revealed. 

Riz Boardshorts are all too aware of this ticking time bomb, and have set out on a mission to become the world’s first 100% recycled and recyclable boardshort brand – a worthy mission in my eyes.  Their aim is not just to use recycled polyester for all of their products, but also to utilise recycled plastics in all of the other components that are often overlooked by companies producing “recycled” clothing – elements like trims, zippers, buttons and Velcro.  They aren’t stopping at a recycled item of clothing that you can send back to them when worn out to be recycled again, however, and want to take it all one-step further.  Their plan is to take plastic bottles collected from beaches and turn that marine litter into a pair of boardshorts.  They’re currently coming towards the end of a crowdfunding campaign to help them achieve this, and are just a short way off their target with a week to go.  Please check it out and if you like what they’re doing or fancy any of the rewards that they’re offering in return for pledges then please go ahead and support them.  

I’ve harped on enough in past blog posts about the various things that you can do to reduce the amount of plastic that you use and tackle the problem of marine plastic pollution, so I won’t repeat myself.  I will say, however, that the Surfers Against Sewage Big Spring Beach Clean series is taking place again this March, over the weekend of the 28^th and 29^th which is the first weekend of the school Easter holidays.  I’ll be helping out with the Polzeath beachclean on Sunday morning organised by Cornish Rock Tors.  If you can join us there (11am start) that would be wonderful, or if you can attend another beach clean event or simply do a #2minutebeachclean next time you visit the beach then it all counts just the same.  Every little helps, after all.

Images of James Otter of Otter Surfboards, shot for Riz Boardshorts.  James and Riz recently interviewed each other about their respective companies attempts to reduce their environmental impact.  You can check out James interviewing Riz here, and Riz interviewing James here.

Riz Boardshorts "Beautiful Boardshorts for Beautiful Oceans" campaign.

Take a Step

Dusting off my soapbox and harping on about marine litter and plastic pollution is becoming an annual thing for me:

It's estimated that there are approximately 2000 pieces of marine litter for every kilometre of beach in the UK, and around 60% of that litter is plastic.  That is a huge amount - just try taking a step along the high tide line of any beach and you'll be sure to find something that's not meant to be there.  At any point along the strand line you'll be able to bend down, peer into the tangle of seaweed left by the receding tide and find a piece of plastic:  an incriminating fingerprint of mankind's disregard for the natural environment.

Last Sunday a group of volunteers cleared around 40kg of small pieces of plastic waste from the strand line at Polzeath, as part of a series of 120 beach cleans organised by Surfers Against Sewage over the weekend that removed 25 tonnes of marine litter from beaches around the UK.  But the amount collected from Polzeath isn't a one off, getting rid of the cumulated plastic waste trawled up and deposited at the top of the beach by the back to back storms this winter;  after every storm a troop of dedicated local residents have been out removing whatever litter has been washed ashore.  So far this year they've taken away 116 bin bags of waste and over 50 dead sea birds.  It's a big, big, problem and with plastic persisting in the marine environment for hundreds if not thousands of years (plastic doesn't disappear, it just breaks down into smaller pieces), it's not one that's going to disappear any time soon

I hope that this puffin with it's beautiful, multicoloured, bill was a victim of the winter storms rather than  marine pollution.  Either way, however, it's not a pleasant thing to find on the sand.  

If you take a step along the beach and do indeed find pieces of litter that aren't meant to be there, then perhaps it's time to take steps against marine plastic pollution.  There are little things that we can all do such as picking up three pieces of litter or doing a two minute beach clean (check out #2minutebeachclean on if you're on instagram) each time we walk off the beach.  Or better still, try to use less plastics so that we don't generate so much plastic waste as individuals.  If we all do a little then hopefully, over time, we can achieve a lot.

Beach cleans at Polzeath, organised by the local Beachcare group, are scheduled for: 

• April 26th @ 9.30am
• May 14th @ 9.30am
• June 20th @ 9.30am
• July 16th @ 9.30am
• August 22nd @ 9.30am
• September 20th @ 9.30am
• October 24th @ 9.30am
• November 19th @ 9.30am
• December 19th @ 9.30am

For further information please feel free to take a look at past An Tor Orth An Mor posts on this subject or click through the links to the various organisations that do so much to fight marine litter:

• Winters Wave of Waste
• Give Up SUPs
• Pick Up 3
• Surfers Against Sewage (marine litter campaigns)
• BeachCare or e-mail neil(dot)hembrow (at) keepbritaintidy(dot)org to get involved.
• 5 Gyres - check out their amazing JUNK voyage.
• The Plastic Pollution Coalition
• Pick Up 3

Winter's Wave of Waste

The fight goes on:  Plastic does not go away, it simply goes somewhere else.

The Easter long weekend signals the start of the tourist season here in the South West of the UK, and over the next seven months a whole economy will be running off the back of our beaches.  And they're in a right state.  Last weekend there were two consecutive beach cleans on my local beach, Polzeath, and at the end of it all there were still multi-coloured bits of plastic in the sand.
On the Friday the local VMCA (Voluntary Marine Conservation Area) did a litter pick on the beach, and then on Saturday there was another one organised as part of Surfers Against Sewage's Big Spring Beach Clean.  At the end of it all you could still turn over any one of the big piles of rotting seaweed (natural and normal) and at the bottom, where the sea lice have decomposed the seaweed into a stinking mush, you could scoop up a big handful and it would be full of tiny particles of plastic.  They were almost impossible to pick out; all of the volunteers were just picking up the visible pieces of plastic - those big enough to grab with rubber gloves on and, usually, the brightly coloured and highly visible pieces.  All of the tiny pieces of clear plastic remained for another day, and that's the sad fact of the matter; you could spend all day every day picking up all of the tiny pieces of plastic and each high tide would just wash in even more.

   

These little pieces of plastic, often called "nurdles" or "mermaids tears", come from a variety of sources.  Many are the small pellets used in the primary production of injection moulded plastic products such as buckets, bins and things like that.  You know when plastic products have that little circular blob somewhere on the bottom with a kind of stringy bit of plastic hanging off it?  That's a product that's been injection moulded, a process where tiny plastic pellets are heated up and squirted into a mould.  Other tiny plastic particles come from things like face-scrubs and exfoliators.  Yup, those tiny beads that you rub into your face to clean it are actually plastic, and they go down your plughole and end up, eventually, in the sea and on the beaches.  One positive point is that Unilever announced in January that they will remove all plastic microbeads from their products by 2015.  It's a start I guess.

So what's the problem with such tiny pieces of plastic?  Out of sight, out of mind no?  Definitely not.  Plastic acts like a sponge to chemicals and toxins, absorbing them and carrying them around.  Fish, shellfish and seabirds ingest the plastic and it often fails to pass through their digestive systems, so they accumulate plastic and the toxins that they carry.  We eat said fish and shellfish, and the process of bioaccumulation stops with us, the apex predator.  Of 504 fish examined in a recent study undertaken by a team from the University of Plymouth and the UK Marine Biological Association, more than a third were found to contain pieces of plastic less than one millimetre in size.

Sir David Attenborough can say it far more eloquently than I can.

Part of an outdoor art installation on the beach in Rio constructed entirely from discarded plastic bottles.  This was an exhibit for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) from which the EU pledged to be at the forefront of efforts to reduce marine litter.

Beach litter isn't a particularly pleasant subject to photograph.  I've got a whole folder on my hard drive full of images of beaches covered in plastic, bits of fishing net, bottles and dead birds.  It's grim.  This May 21st I'll be giving a presentation on Marine Plastic Pollution for Polzeath VMCA at the Tubestation in Polzeath, and whilst I'm certain that they could have got somebody in who is much more of an authority on the topic than me, I've definitely got enough images to illustrate an hour long talk.  It will be publicised more nearer the time but if you're in the area then you're more than welcome to attend.  I have a feeling that I will be preaching to the converted however I've been keeping a few choice images back and I hope that I'll be able to make it as interesting and engaging as possible.

For past rants about the subject of marine litter and plastic on our beaches (they're becoming an annual feature on here) and for hints and tips on small things that you can try to do to make a difference, please click through to read previous posts "Give Up SUP's" and "Pick Up 3".  

Give Up SUP's (single use plastics)

WARNING: Reading this post about the problems of plastic pollution in our oceans and it's impact on the marine environment and wildlife might make you sick up in your mouth a bit. Also, it's a massive, massive, subject area and I can't do it justice in a single post (I've tried before) so I'll pepper this piece with links so that, should you wish to, you can click away and learn some more, and hopefully be moved to become a force of change.

Look what I found on my local beach during a beach clean last October. No needle but the plastic body of a syringe (held by Neil of BeachCare) on a beach that I run down without looking where I'm stepping and which we walk our dog on most days. Barf.

Spring is starting to show it's sunny self here in the South West of the UK which means that the beaches are getting busier; there are lots of people coming down to the beach, and there is also a load of litter on the sand that's been washed ashore by the winter storms over the past few months. This is a year-round problem on almost every single stretch of coastline on the entire planet and it's a problem that we can't tactfully ignore or shy away from.

The beach that I live on is part of a Marine Conservation Area and is cared for by a group of legendary volunteers. Part of their work is undertaking regular beach cleans alongside the BeachCare programme run by Keep Britain Tidy who organise beach cleans on 17 beaches across Devon and Cornwall. Neil who runs the project just sent out a newsletter detailing the past years work; 790 big bin bags of rubbish were removed from our local beaches over the course of 113 beach clean events utilising 2200 volunteer hours on the beach. Most of these events last for around an hour and they finish with tea and cake so it's well worth it, and if you can't make it along to one then here's an idea...why not take a couple of empty bags with you when you walking along the beach and pick up any plastic and trash that you find (use one as a "glove") or pick up anything that shouldn't be on the beach when you're walking back up the beach after a surf. If everybody picked up just three bits every time they visited the beach then it'd make a massive difference. Check out the inspirational Pick Up 3 campaign started by a 16 year old kid in California fed up with the state of his local beach.

Some friends and I explored the coast of Oman towards the end of Cyclone season and it seemed that all of the litter in the Indian Ocean had been pushed up into this corner and washed up on the mostly deserted coastline.

The two repeat offenders on the list of items picked up from our beaches are plastic pieces (aka nurdles or "mermaids tears") and fishing flotsam and jetsam such as line and nets. 2011 has seen a large increase in fishing related litter which is being investigated and combated by Fishing For Litter. The impacts of fishing nets and monofilament line, alongside plastic packaging straps, are best illustrated by the Gannets of Grassholm Island, just off the coast of Wales. Each year 40,000 nesting pairs arrive on the island to build or repair their nests, and often the nest-building males collect plastic litter from the oceans in preference to seaweed because it floats and is highly visible, then return to Grassholm to weave it into their nests. Juvenile gannet chicks often become entangled in this synthetic material and as they grow become trapped and tethered to their nests. When the colony returns to sea in Autumn the trapped juveniles are left behind and slowly starve unless released by the small team of RSPB volunteers who visit the island each year to cut them free. Grim. On Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, miles from anywhere, seabird corpses decompose revealing just a skeleton and a gut full of plastic crap that they've eaten.

A juvenile gannet that perished after becoming entangled in plastic litter that was woven into it's nest on Grassholm Island. Image courtesy of the RSPB.

But it's not just seabirds. Plastic bags bob around the oceans looking remarkably like jellyfish to the large marine animals that feed on them. Postmortem examinations carried out on dead cetaceans and turtles frequently reveal guts full of plastic bags which do not pass through or decompose and accumulate and starve the animals. I've harped on about it before, but the fate of turtles who eat plastic bags and then float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun particularly grosses me out.

A lot of this crap blows around in the wind as well as being transported by ocean currents. The correlation between onshore winds and beach pollution is plain to see. The wind blew from the west every day in December, and in January BeachCare removed over 200 bags of litter from local beaches. For ocean borne litter, much of it floats around in the currents until eventually winding up in one of the five Oceanic gyres which are points of confluence for major currents in each of the major oceans.

Maximenko's Plastic Pollution Growth Model from 5 Gyres on Vimeo.

So that's all pretty depressing. How do we, little old "us", make a difference? Here's a few ideas of how you can think global, act local and be a small cog in a bigger engine for change:

• Pick Up 3. Or more if you can join a regular beach clean event, details here and here.
• Refuse plastic bags. If you visit the supermarket then take your own bags, buy a bag for life or if you're in the USA use a paper bag and recycle it. If you have your groceries delivered then click the option for delivery without bags so your shopping arrives in crates that the driver takes back to the store.
• Carry A Cup. Keep a cup or small flask in your bag or car to take into coffee shops rather than getting take-out cups. Those plastic lids are particularly evil.
• Drink from the tap. In many countries tap water is totally safe so if possible drink from the tap or refill bottles rather than buying expensive and pointless bottled water. I grew up just a few miles away from a plant that bottled water for a supermarket. Exactly the same water that came out of the tap at my home.
• Try to buy grocery items that aren't overly packaged (loose vegetables immediately spring to mind). If enough people refuse to buy based on excessive packaging then the supermarkets will stop using it. It'd save them money too after all. If you're funny about the possibility of other humans touching your food at some point then wash it or peel it when you get home.

LINKS:

• Surfers Against Sewage (marine litter campaigns)
• BeachCare or e-mail neil(dot)hembrow (at) keepbritaintidy(dot)org to get involved.
• 5 Gyres - check out their amazing JUNK voyage.
• The Plastic Pollution Coalition
• Pick Up 3

Pick Up 3

In mid-winter we have all sorts of flotsam and jetsam wash up on the beaches of Cornwall.
Photo by Dave Williams.

Iniative Surf recently ran a training camp on Long Island, New York and the groms got involved with improving their beach environment after a training session.
Getting good habits at an early age.
Photo by Alex Espir.

All this will end up in the Ocean that you can see at the end of the ditch (right into the line-up of a surf spot) next time it rains. This has to change.

An Tor Orth An Mor took a two week holiday this northern summer, a bit last minute and far enough off the map to make posting photos difficult so apologies if you missed us...but we're back now, so on with business.

This one is an important one, both to spread a message well worth spreading and to try and shout it from the roof tops and encourage you the reader to pass the message on, but also to salute the people in this post who lead the charge in one way or another and do their bit.
Litter. You wouldn't believe how much of it ends up in the oceans or washed up on beaches, almost anywhere in the world no matter how remote and off the beaten track you go there's a pretty good chance that you'll find some plastic washed up on your idylic beach, maybe carried there by the winds and currents from thousands of miles away. In some places there are unbelievable levels of rubbish on the beaches and in the water, perhaps because of the prevailing wind direction or because the locals there don't have any refuse collection and wherever they throw it, it washes downstream to the coast. But regardless of the reasons why, it really shouldn't be there at all. But how can you help? Sometimes there's just too much to feel that you can make a difference.

Pick Up 3. It's that simple. The brainchild of 16 year old Cobi Emery from San Diego, California, Pick Up 3 asks you to pick up just three pieces of litter or trash when you walk back up the beach from the surf. You can carry three bits in one hand and dump them in a bin at the top of the beach or put them in a bag in your car to dispose of later, that way slowly but surely, little by little, we can start to make a difference; it's enough to have an impact whilst still being easily manageable.
Not only does the beach look nicer then, but the impact on the marine environment is amazing too - thousands of turtles and dolphins die each year because they mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them, only to either fill their guts with undigestable plastic and starve, or in the case of turtles, float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun. Wrong. So plastic bags, bottles, bits of fishing nets and line...if it didn't grow there it shouldn't go there.

My friend Alex from Initiative Surf asks all of his clients, be they junior competitive surfers or clients on guided surf trips to pick up 3 on their way back from every surf as part of his coaching regime, whilst Tom and the staff and customers of Island Vibe in Jeffreys Bay do regular beach clean ups there, with one big annual effort. This year 80 of them collected litter on the western beaches of J-Bay, filling bags and bags with unwanted refuse. Unfortunately, the next time the wind blows offshore, more plastic will blow out of the township and down the beach, just as after the first rains of the season in Morocco, Indonesia or any other developing coastal nation the water is too filthy to surf or swim in because the floodwater washes out all of the ditches and drains that locals use to dump their refuse in to. But perhaps slowly, 3 pieces at a time we can set an example, educate and begin to clean up the marine environment because we all live downstream of something and the oceans are too important to mess with.

Leave it better than you found it. Please.

Staff and guests at Island Vibe clearing the beach and drains that make up their back yard.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

More people and less litter than the previous year, so it's looking hopeful.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

A good job well done.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

Volounteers from the Polzeath VMCA clearing our local beach, thanks guys!

www.pickup3.org
www.sas.org.uk
www.surfrider.org
www.polzeathmarineconservation.com