DUSTBIN OF THE WORLD

Heartbreaking. Shocking. The story of how, on one Cornish beach, we found mountains of plastic from all over the globe that should change your shopping habits for life

Gazing down from the north Cornish dunes on a golden autumn day, the scene was breathtakingly beautiful.

Huge, foaming waves crashed onto mirror-flat sands that stretched for miles, and there was barely a soul in sight.

The view would be familiar to anyone who has watched TV’s Poldark, which was filmed on this dramatic coast, and one imagines it has changed little in the 200 years since Ross and Demelza supposedly galloped across the rugged cliffs.

as i scrambled down to Perranporth Beach, however, the image of a timeless, unspoilt idyll came to a swift and depressing end.

Strung out along the shoreline, like a multicoloured necklace, the receding tide had deposited countless thousands of waste objects — the great majority made from plastic — which had become entangled in the shingle and seaweed.

Collecting random items from the unsightly detritus, and examining them more closely, their origins became apparent.

Much of the rubbish derived from unnecessary packaging: Styrofoam cups from coffee chains, ‘designer’ water bottles, sauce sachets, cocktail stirrers, drinking straws and takeaway food wrappers.

Very few of these items had been tossed aside by the handful of people walking on the beach.

They had been carelessly discarded many miles from the coast, and found their way into the sea in myriad ways: via drains and sewage pipes, rivers and streams, or simply blown by the wind.

More disconcertingly, a sizeable proportion of the jetsam and flotsam i picked up did not even come from Britain. Because plastic is not biodegradable, it stays in the sea indefinitely and is carried thousands of miles by currents, so our beaches are now a depository for all manner of rubbish irresponsibly jettisoned in distant countries.

indeed, the amount of litter in UK coastal waters (three-quarters of which is plastic) rose by 158 per cent last year, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural affairs announced last week.

From the English Channel to the tip of Scotland, from west Wales to East anglia, no corner of our islands is entirely sheltered from the plastic tide. Yet because of its extreme south-westerly location, in the eye of the gulf Stream and prevailing onshore winds, sadly it is Cornwall whose stunning beaches are most likely to be hit by these surges of tidal debris.

‘The sea has become a plastic war zone and we are walking along the front line,’ said Hugo Tagholm, chief executive of Cornwall-based charity Surfers against Sewage, as we surveyed the three-mile scar of pollution at Perranporth.

This was no exaggeration. among the items we found were a Spanish skin- cream canister, a corrosive liquid container from germany, a Turkish yoghurt pot, a Polish waffle wrapper, a milk carton from irish supermarket Centra, a French coffee jar, and several spent plastic bullet cartridges likely carried across the atlantic from Canada.

We also stumbled on scores more items whose origins could not be established; a mousse hairspray, a whisky bottle, margarine containers, workmen’s helmets, a printer cartridge, bits of fishing net, utensils — plus the ubiquitous plastic bottle tops, cotton bud sticks, and small stoppers of the kind used to block airholes in inflatables.

THEN there were the abandoned rubber flip flops. ‘ For some reason we find lots of these,’ said Hugo, holding one aloft.

a red plastic fish basket marked ‘Plymouth Trawlers’, which had presumably fallen overboard from a fishing boat, served as a receptacle for all this waste. We dragged it away for recycling — so that the items could be reprocessed into useful products.

a small, symbolic gesture, but futile given the enormous scale of the problem.

One ugly slab of compressed black plastic was so big and heavy that i mistook it for a boulder. Heaven knows what that was for, or where it came from, but it might well still be lying on the beach thousands of years from now.

For the durability of plastic in the environment is frighteningly evident from the exhibits in a grim display of items gathered from Cornish beaches by Surfers against Sewage’s clean-up volunteers.

They include a golden Wonder crisps packet from 1968, according to researchers; a Jeyes fluid carton used for household cleaning in 1970; and a sachet of Supersoft

shampoo that lathered someone’s hair half a century ago.

It might feel like they have been around for a long time, but we shouldn’t forget it takes a plastic water bottle about 450 years to break down completely in the sea.

Also in the collection is a cigarette tin that appears to have floated here from North Korea, a plastic ship’s beacon washed up from Florida, and pieces of Lego spilled many years ago from a container ship in the North Pacific.

However, the most poignant exhibit is a bowl filled with bottle tops and other bits of plastic, all of which were found in the stomach of a baby albatross found in Hawaii — and sent to Britain to highlight the danger — which is thought to have swallowed them after mistaking them for food.

This sort of catastrophe was witnessed many times by the team that filmed the acclaimed BBC TV series Blue Planet. It moved sir David Attenborough to speak about the need to tackle the threat from plastic pollution at the show’s launch event earlier this month.

‘We may think we live a live a long way from the ocean, but we don’t,’ said 91-year-old sir David.

‘What we do here has a direct effect on the oceans, and what the oceans do reflects back on us.

‘For the first time in the history of humanity, for the first time in 500 million years, one species has the future in the palm of its hands. I hope he realises that is the case.’

sir David said he believed that plastic pollution posed as great a threat to the seas as global warming, and added: ‘What we’re going to do about a 1.5 degrees rise in the temperature of the oceans in the next 10 years, I don’t know. But we can do something about plastic right now.’

A later episode of the Blue Planet series is expected to highlight the plastic threat.

HOWEVER, statistics tell us why finding ways to drastically reduce its usage, and safely dispose of it, has become many environmentalists’ top priority.

Of the 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic produced worldwide since World War II, almost 80 per cent is still in existence, much of it in the sea, as well as in landfill sites.

Indeed, since plastic breaks down into microscopic polymers when subjected to sunlight and air for very long periods of time (it can only be destroyed completely by incineration), it is forming a rock-like sedimentary layer covering great swathes of the earth.

In the oceans, small bits of broken- off plastic have formed billions of lentil-sized pellets that are ingested by marine creatures — and, of course, when we eat seafood, they are swallowed by us.

researchers from King’s College London recently found that 80 per cent of British mussels are contaminated by these microplastic particles, which are also increasingly prevalent in fish.

Plastic fibres were also found in 83 per cent of tap water samples. It is not yet known how efficiently the human body processes plastic, but one doesn’t need to be an expert to sense the potential dangers.

Despite the recycling revolution, and the perception that the British are more environment-conscious, figures suggest our reliance on disposables and plastic is becoming ever greater, and that our casual indifference to the manner of their disposal is worsening.

Mary Creagh, chairman of the environmental audit committee, described last year’s 158 per cent rise in the amount of litter in British coastal waters as ‘worrying’.

Lib Dem environment spokesman Tim Farron warned: ‘Unless we take action, in a few years Blue Planet will have to be renamed Plastic Planet.’

All scientific indicators suggest he is right. If dumping continues at the current rate, experts estimate that by 2030 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. It is a terrifying scenario.

The plastic dumped in the ocean is circulated around the world by powerful ‘gyres’, which act like giant conveyor belts. The major currents flow continuously, in the same direction. But because their flow sometimes meanders, it is difficult to predict where items dropped into the sea will end up.

BECAUSE of the way these currents flow, almost all of the plastic on the Cornish coast from overseas originates from the U.s. east coast, Canada, Caribbean islands and West Africa, says oceanographer Professor erik van sebille.

He says it is inconceivable that the North Korean cigarette tin was actually dumped off that country’s coast, because items deposited in the Pacific Ocean remain there.

Likewise, the Turkish yoghurt pot is unlikely to have been dropped into the eastern Mediterranean, because its currents do not flow outwards into the Atlantic.

so although these items may have been made and purchased in those countries, they must have arrived here via some other route. Dropped from a ship perhaps.

But however the plastic arrived here, it does not alter the fact that this is a international catastrophe and that nowhere is immune.

According to surfers Against sewage, the bullet cartridges could also have come from Canada, for at least 200,000 seabirds are shot each year in licensed hunts in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Another item we found — a plastic canister of toilet cleaner — is thought to originate in China.

The buoyancy of the rubbish is another factor. some denser, heavier items sink to the bottom of the ocean, whereas lighter objects float until they make landfall.

Professor Van sebille calculates that a bottle dropped off the coast near shanghai might be carried eastward by the North Pacific gyre for more than 7,000 miles, ending up on the coast of North America.

Much of the plastic on Britain’s beaches is brought by the Gulf stream and North Atlantic Drift. so debris dumped on the U.s. east coast often drifts 3,000 miles to the Channel, Irish sea and North sea.

Assuming the plastic gun cartridges at Perranporth were dropped in the sea in North America, experts estimate they could have reached Cornwall in four weeks.

It could have taken a week or so for the items from spain to wash up here. And the French coffee jar might have drifted across the

Channel in a few days. The cigarette tin from North Korea could have been at sea for years. As with all these items, there is always the possibility it spilled from one of the 10,000 freight containers estimated to fall each year from cargo ships. Or it might have been tossed overboard by a Korean seaman.

Equally, we should remember that Britain’s plastic is also polluting other countries. A carton dropped in the sea off Cornwall may reach the Scandinavian fjords.

Not only is it abhorrent to see Britain’s beaches being suffocated with trash; our history and geography has given us a visceral connection with the sea.

So what can be done? As conservationist Hugo Tagholm says, the first thing is for people to make the connection between the health of the oceans and their daily lives.

Much could be achieved if we all made simple lifestyle changes, he says.

Carrying refillable water bottles, and drinking coffee from reusable cups; rejecting plastic straws, knives and forks; using sauce bottles rather than sachets; avoiding plastic bathroom items where possible. And always recycling plastic items rather than flushing them down the loo or, worse, dropping them in the street.

These steps may seem fairly insignificant, but given 200 plastic water bottles were found on every mile of our coastline last year, they could make a huge difference.

Following the huge reduction in the use of plastic carrier bags, resulting from the 5p levy campaign led by the Mail, green groups are lobbying for a return deposit system to be introduced for plastic containers, like that which once encouraged the return of glass bottles to corner shops.

More wishfully, some are calling for retailers to dispense with plastic packaging entirely. They have an unlikely supporter in former Asda boss, Andy Clarke.

Whether these moves can be implemented, and how effective they might be, is anyone’s guess. Britain is just one small country, and it will require a global effort to stop the plastic tide becoming an unstoppable tsunami.

We must hope, therefore, that the world heeds Sir David’s impassioned plea. Otherwise, as I saw when walking along the despoiled Cornish coast, the wonders of the Blue Planet will be lost forever.

Sign up for your free Plastic Free Coastlines guide at plasticfree.org.uk