‘Every time I walk by the coast, I fill a bag with rubbish’
Catriona Mann has tried to make a positive difference since watching The Blue Planet by litter picking and setting up a business producing wax eco wraps.
Walking along the beach, minutes from my home in East Fife, I breathe in the salty air and appreciate how lucky I am to live so close to Scotland’s beautiful coast. I walk here every day and never tire of seeing the waves crashing in or gently lapping at the shore as birds swoop and dive overhead.
Moving here in 2018 was the best decision I’ve ever made, but it was a shock, too, because of the astonishing amount of debris I see washed up on the beach day after day. I never manage a walk without picking
I want to keep Scotland’s beautiful coast litter free
up rubbish, whether it’s plastic bottles, balloons, fishing debris, such as rope, gloves and netting, which has been carelessly thrown overboard, and, lately, discarded face masks. I’m a fan of year-round sea swimming and sometimes I bump into a plastic bottle bobbing in the waves, which is always so depressing.
Every Sunday, a friend and I walk 10km along the coast and we each take a large bin bag. Every single time we return with the bags full of rubbish. The fact that there’s so much litter on one small beach shows how much there must be in our oceans. It’s horrifying.
Like many people, my wake-up call was a few years ago watching The Blue Planet, when Sir David Attenborough revealed that 8m tonnes of plastic finds its way into our seas every year, poisoning marine life and entering the food chain. I hadn’t really thought about it before. At the time, I’d just moved to Jersey to work as a manager for John Lewis & Partners. Before that, I’d always been a city girl, but I felt an immediate connection with the ocean. I learned to surf at 50 and regularly swam in the sea.
Then, travelling around New Zealand in a camper van four years ago, I noticed that they were years ahead of us in terms of green living – no plastic bags or plastic bottles in sight. I was particularly struck by the reusable clingfilm made out of beeswax that was used everywhere. Clingfilm can’t be recycled so every piece used since the 1950s is still here in landfill and we use enough of it every year to wrap around the planet 30 times. Having taken voluntary redundancy before my trip, I hatched a plan to bring the beeswax product back home and start my own business.
I was newly single after a separation and moved back to Scotland and Crail, a village I knew from childhood. There’s a great community and we all try our best to keep our beach clean. As well as my daily litter-picking trawls, I help clean up after tourists, some of whom leave their rubbish on the beach.
I’m no eco warrior, but I believe a few changes could have a huge impact. If we all stopped buying single-use plastic, it would force big companies to offer alternatives and, hopefully, improve the health of our oceans.
• bplasticfree.com