Is rising up from sea
the things, snagged in among seaweed and peppered with plastic cotton bud sticks – the kind that the Scottish Government last week agreed to ban. When I heard the news of the ban, I have to say I was surprised that they had chosen to focus on cotton buds. I’ve never bought them in my life and I’m not sure I know anyone who has, so the fact that they were apparently littering our seas in their tiny, stick-y glory was news to me.
Yet they are. Blue ones, white ones, yellow ones. They wash up on the beach in Cramond with alarming regularity. An image from American wildlife photographer Justin Hofmann, part of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition which opened at the National Museum of Scotland yesterday, offers a chilling insight into the impact of these items. His photograph shows a tiny sea horse, its tail wrapped around a pink cotton bud stick as it swims through the ocean. The picture’s title is “Sewage Surfer”.
While the 88 volunteers at the Cramond clean-up were spread out to tackle a long stretch of beach, those who were working in a designated 100m section were asked to document everything they found, in a bid to get some kind of feel for the scope and type of rubbish which is on the beach. In that small section alone, 335 cotton buds were found. Meanwhile, of all of the 8,585 items found in the 100m stretch, a massive 6,583, or 76.7 per cent, were classed as “sanitary” – including wet wipes and their possibly even more unpleasant cousins, nappies and sanitary towels. All of this came out of sewage pipes after someone put flushed them down their toilet.
Last year, the MCS launched its Wet Wipes Turn Nasty campaign, which, as well as trying to educate people about what should actually go down the loo – the “three Ps” of “poo, pee and paper”, apparently – also asked producers and retailers of wet wipes to ensure packaging was clearly labelled with “Do Not Flush” messaging.
The friendly American was not the only passer-by to remark, positively, on our work. There is no doubt that the public’s attitude towards attempts, however meagre, to clean up our oceans and beaches has, if you’ll pardon the pun, undergone something of a sea change in just the past few months. It is no longer the work of environmentalists and beach users. It has became a problem for all of us.
The BBC’S Blue Planet TV series, which aired last year, showcased the damage that our lifestyle is doing to the seas and the marine life which lives there. The MCS survey actually found that just 12 per cent of the rubbish was left on the beach by members of the public. We have woken up to the reality. Beach littering is no longer what we leave behind when we are visiting, it is what we put down our toilets and into our bins, which is ending up in the sea.
Plastic has been found in the stomachs of almost all marine species including fish, birds, whales, dolphins, seals and turtles, according to the MCS. On our beach clean, plastic accounted for 1,755 items of rubbish, 20 per cent of the waste found. While a few of these items were plastic bottles – just nine were found on the 100m stretch – there were 63 items such as single-use plastic straws, cutlery and trays. We also spotted tiny little plastic pellets known as “nurdles”, which are used as a raw material by industry to make new plastic products. The pellets – which also go by the misleadingly attractive name of “mermaids’s tears” – soak up chemical pollutants from their surroundings and then release the toxins into the animals that eat them.
If the idea that microplastics have been found in the stomachs of fish and shellfish is not enough to raise alarm, the MCS says it has been estimated that an average European seafood consumer ingests 11,000 plastic particles a year.
We are actually eating the plastic we are allowing to pollute our seas. Let’s take action now.