Found on beach, 1980s crisp packet – and Fairy bottle from the 1950s
THEY have floated in the seas for decades before ending up on British beaches, a powerful demonstration of the menace posed by plastic waste.
A Walkers crisp packet from the 1980s was discovered during a cleanup on a beach in Cornwall.
And a Fairy liquid bottle believed to date from the 1950s was among debris washed up by a storm in Aberdeen.
Both are battered and faded but are still intact, grim examples of the durability of plastics, which can take centuries to break down.
The Daily Mail has been campaigning to turn the tide on the plastic polluting our land and seas.
The Walkers cheese and onion crisps packet was plucked from the sands of Treyarnon Bay, near Padstow, by tenyear-old Laurence Miller.
With its blue packaging barely faded and its lettering and barcode still legible, the bag has remained largely intact despite three decades in the sea.
Although the year on the best-before date has disappeared, researchers identified the bag as one produced in the late 1980s. Laurence, from Wadebridge, Cornwall, said: ‘ We were doing a litter pick, and I was walking where the river meets the sea and I found it embedded in the side of the bank.’
Bookseller Rob Stevenson, 49, who runs the volunteer beach cleaning group at Treyarnon Bay, said: ‘The crisps are more than three times older than Laurence. It really demonstrates just what the problems of using plastics are.
‘We can’t say how long the plastic has been exposed for or where it’s been, but it goes to show if you litter something somewhere, it does generally end up in the sea.’
‘Plastic is a fantastically durable product and it shows in the past 20 or 30 years how much the problem has escalated.’
The Fairy liquid bottle, with its faded but unmistakable logo, was spotted by Angela Slater while walking her border terrier Max on Donmouth beach, Aberdeen.
She said: ‘Whenever I go for a walk I always pick up any rubbish on the beach but this is definitely the oldest thing I have found.
‘I looked at old Fairy adverts and this bottle matches the designs from the 1950s and 60s. The fact it’s survived for all these years really makes the scale of the plastic problem hit home.’
Mrs Slater, 45, added that in an average hour-long dog walk on the beach she will pick up enough plastic to fill a bin bag. ‘It is just shocking and I would urge anyone who can to help clear up their local beaches,’ she said.
A spokesman for Walkers said: ‘We take the problem of litter and waste very seriously.
‘We include on-pack labels to encourage our consumers to dispose of their waste responsibly and are also working towards the goal of designing all our packaging to be recyclable, compostable or biodegradable by 2025.’
Procter & Gamble, which makes Fairy, estimated the washing-up liquid bottle was from the 1950s or 60s. A spokesman said: ‘It serves as a reminder of the responsibility we all have to protect the planet for future generations. It is not acceptable that any packaging ends up in our oceans.
‘The responsibility lies both with manufacturers to use more recyclable materials and with consumers to dispose of packaging in the correct way.’
In October Fairy announced that it will produce the first ever bottle made of 100 per cent recycled plastic, including 10 per cent ocean plastic. It will appear on shelves later this year.