Climate and Community decided to join the Marine Conservation Society at their event on Llangethin beach. The stunning beach at the other end of Rhossili. We saw the face book post from Plastic free Swansea promoting the event, in hindsight the mistake we made was not registering on the Marine Conservation website which informs the organiser you are going. Consequently we turned up in Broughton farm car park at 10.30am on July 15th. Only to find nobody else had turned up!
We decided to pick the beach any way as we had brought litter picking equipment, armed with bags and gloves we walked for 20 minutes through the dunes to find a beautiful stretch of beach. However the rocky area at high tide mark alongside the dunes was full of plastic fragments. We concentrated on the rocky area immediately right from the path where we emerged from the dunes. The more you looked the more you found. Bottle caps, pen casings, broken combs, plastic toys and the list goes on. Fragments of plastic were the most worrying as they had been on the beach and in the sea for a while, beginning to turn into ‘beads’. We picked up everything plastic and made our way along the pebbly rocks.
It reminded me of the Pippi Long Stocking stories where she describes herself as a ‘pickupstuffer’. She is determined to find something useful in the trash. I ask the beach to give me something back for my troubles; it never ceases to answer my call. We collected a baby with a dodgy dictator’s salute, a weird looking diver, a mini sandcastle mould and some tyres. There is a dastardly plot in that picture where the baby has decided to take over the world. Well plastic certainly has and after two and a half hours we had had enough of the heat and sorting plastic.
Llangethin beach needs more cleaning up and could easily justify a multiple day camp, to really give the beach a deep clean. Something to consider for the future. Anyone interested please get in contact
