Beachwatch

In September 2008, 5219 Marine Conservation Society volunteers around the UK cleaned and surveyed 374 beaches, covering 175.7 Km of coastline. In one weekend they filled 3188 bags with 385,659 items of litter and found and average of 2195 items per kilometre.

Beachwatch is an annual event where people 'give something back' to the community and the environment - the beach is a great place to have some fun so we spent a few hours on Cleethorpes Beach cleaning it up and making sure it's in good order.

Thirty two sixth form students and members of staff volunteered to help out, and found an astounding number of items - combing just over 75000m2 of beach we came across 2053 items, most of which were just bits of plastic, however there were some odd finds; a sock here and there, a bucket, and a few unpleasant items including a bag of faeces!

Sounds like gruelling work eh? That's far from the truth however; it was a nice sunny day, and walking up and down the beach finding interesting objects and climbing around hard to reach places was far more fun that hard work.

A few statistics:

This was the second year we have taken part in Beachwatch and everyone is looking forward to next September when we are hoping to recruit more volunteers.