Clean up our waterways with your own recycled boat
BRITAIN’S waterways are turning into a junkyard of plastic waste, filled with abandoned bottles, tyres, and carrier bags.
Our main image shows a floating platform of bottles, branches, tin, and barrels clogging up Salford Quays, yards from a sports centre where children and adults regularly go boating.
Another shows a swan – head down, feathers back – swimming through a filthy flotsam of discarded plastics plaguing the River Lea in Bow, East London.
But these are just a couple of examples of how our canals, lakes and rivers are becoming the country’s dumping ground.
They are blighted by the deluge of plastic bottles simply thrown away before joining the estimated eight million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean each year.
Today the Daily Mirror has joined forces with environmental charity Hubbub to give you the chance to make a difference to your area and to quash the myth that plastic can’t be recycled.
Thanks to a vessel built by the Nada on the River Lea
Queen’s boat maker from 99% recycled plastic, community groups will be able to clean up canals, rivers and lakes through “plastic fishing trips”.
This is funded by the 5p charge from disposable coffee cups at Starbucks introduced in July.
Trewin Restorick, chief executive and founder of Hubbub, said: “We all know plastic is a threat to our oceans but the issue can often start much closer to home.
“Some 80% of plastic in our oceans is from land, and shockingly has been found in fish we eat such as mussels and mackerel.
“Rubbish blights rivers and canals across the UK and is being eaten by birds, fish and other species, harming wildlife and entering the food chain.
“Not only have we got to change consumer behaviour, we need to create infrastructure to recycle all the plastics we produce.
“Hopefully projects like this can show it is possible.”
Last year Hubbub launched the world’s first 99% recycled plastic boat, called Poly-Mer, made from 8,000 plastic water bottles.
Parent Christine Armstrong at Canary Wharf College, East London, had heard about the activities of a Dutch organisation called Plastic Whale, which cleans up Amsterdam’s canals.
College principal Sarah Counter adapted the idea and encouraged her students to clean up their area.
Inspired by their story, Hubbub collected 8,000 plastic bottles from cycling event Ride London and set out to make the world’s first recycled plastic boat.
Since then they have taken more than 1,000 people “fishing” in London’s Docklands, collecting more than 1,250 plastic bottles and generating nearly £10,000 in donations for the college.
These bottles will be turned into a new boat, which will be given to the winner of a competition, details of which are below. After