Heartache at Constantine Bay as nature bows to the curse of plastic
Our reporter joins a team of volunteers fighting the unceasing tide of indestructible litter
‘Adrive belt, two plastic grills, bottle tops, a washing machine pipe…” Trevor Kippax is sorting through the contents of a rubbish bag on the shoreline of Constantine Bay. “And that is the third sack I’ve filled today. I love this beach, and it is so sad when you see it in this state.”
The 63-year-old retired council officer is part of a growing army of volunteers embarking on the Herculean task of cleaning Cornwall’s beaches from the vast amounts of plastic that have washed up in recent days in the wake of Storm Eleanor. Constantine Bay – which was a holiday favourite of Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister and where the Prince of Wales learnt to surf in 1973 – has been particularly badly affected.
Yesterday evening, as the sun was setting, the latest organised beach clean was under way with a dozens of volunteers holding rubbish bags fanning out across the sand.
The litter pickers ranged from retirees to four-year-old children. Among them were Cathy Spence, 30, and Victoria Lewis, 22, youth hostel workers. “We came here a few days ago when it was at its worst,” says Ms Spence. “There was a dead seal that had been caught up in a load of plastic and just rubbish everywhere. It was really depressing.”
The vast amount of plastic in our oceans has been brought into sharp focus in recent days with the scenes of devastation on Constantine Bay replayed right across Cornwall and beyond. Fighting plastic pollution is fast becoming one of the defining challenges of our times.
In 1950, the world’s population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tons of plastic; in 2016, a global population of more than 7 billion people produced more than 320million tons of plastic.
Every day, approximately eight million pieces wash into the oceans, where they choke marine life.
Around Britain’s coastline, 5,000 items of marine plastic pollution have been found per mile of beach.
The length of time it takes for these materials to degrade and the distance they travel around the world’s oceans is highlighted by the rubbish they are collecting in Constantine Bay.
Among the most recent haul is a Quavers crisp packet with a best before date of 1980; a Snickers bar wrapper advertising a promotion for Euro 96; and lobster pot tags from Newfoundland written in 1986.
A barnacle-encrusted marine monitor from Nova Scotia has also recently washed up, along with a tin of custard from the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, on nearby Porth Mear – a beautiful cove that featured in the BBC’S Poldark –a mammoth pile of detritus has also amassed.
“You feel like you are never going to clean everything because it just keeps coming back again,” says Jim Coatsworth, a 55-year-old supermarket worker who beach cleans whenever he has a day off.
Yesterday evening’s clean-up was organised by Rob Stevenson, a 49-year-old company director. This winter he launched a Beach Guardian scheme with Emily, his 20-year-old daughter, who is in the final year of a degree in marine biology at nearby Plymouth University.
There have been four clean-ups in the past 10 days and there are more in the pipeline.
He plans to take some of the rubbish to local schools to try to persuade the next generation to be less profligate with their waste. “Even if they stopped making plastics tomorrow, we would be doing this for another 200 years,” he says.
Emily is currently writing her dissertation on plastic waste she has collected in this area of Cornwall known as the Seven Bays.
Last night she found a Walkers crisp packet with a sell-by date of Aug 16 1997 – making it older than her.
She estimates she has personally collected more than 100kg (220lb) of rubbish and separates the plastics by tipping the contents of each bag into the bath – much to her mother’s annoyance. She has discovered one rubbish bag alone can contain up to 1,250 pieces of plastic.
“The other day I looked at the state of the beach and had a mini breakdown because it was so bad,” she says. “But then I told myself if everybody thought there was nothing we could do then we will never get anywhere. Even if you change a tiny thing then at least you are getting people moving in the right direction.”
The hope here is that political will is slowly beginning to catch up with the feelings of these volunteers who have been fighting the rising tide of plastic for years.
This week Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, was pictured in Downing Street with a reusable coffee cup – donated by Cornish campaign Refill Cornwall which is working to address the 2.5billion plastic-lined takeaway coffee cups thrown away nationwide every year.
Nearby Penzance has just been declared the first “plastic-free community” in Britain with the town council and businesses vowing to drop single-use plastic.
Rob Stevenson is working with the charity Surfers Against Sewage to set up a similar scheme in Padstow – the nearest town to Constantine Bay.
He says many of the volunteers who have turned up to help out in recent days have been moved to act by the recent series Blue Planet II, which detailed harrowing scenes of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.
There is frustration, though, among volunteers that the rubbish they collect will not end up being recycled.
Cornwall county council got rid of the beach recycling bins some years ago and a beach warden scheme was similarly abandoned.
Jo Stuttaford, a parish councillor whose family have lived by the beach since 1947, admits she has given up campaigning for the scheme to be restarted.
Still, those who live here have little choice but to keep waging the war against the rubbish on their beach.
Jane Darke, who also took place in last night’s clean-up, has been tidying the Cornish sands since 1990.
“At least things are now moving in the right direction,” she says. “Now we have to stop using this stuff.”
‘Even if they stopped making plastics tomorrow, we would be doing this for another 200 years’