How to organise a beach clean
Plastic: while this modern material can be highly useful in many contexts, its durability is also a curse. When it’s discarded it’s a blight on our wild spaces, and a threat to our wildlife - both as litter, and when it breaks down, as microplastics which pollute ecosystems and weaken or kill organisms when ingested. A disheartening thought – but remember that taking action to pick up litter, however small, could help save an animal’s life.
Beaches are landscapes especially vulnerable to accumulating rubbish, and we encourage you to join a local beach cleanup or even organise one if you can. Kent is home to a whopping 350 miles of coastline, with many nature reserves along its length, so we’re a natural candidate for hosting community beach clean events. If you’re feeling inspired, organising your own event can be a fun way to meet like-minded people, connect with coastal wildlife, and help to protect these fascinating ecosystems.
Phase 1: Preparing for your beach clean
1. Choose your beach
Ideally it’ll be an easily-accessible stretch of beach, with enough litter that needs collecting. Next, you might do a bit of online digging to identify who owns the land. If you aren’t sure, you can contact your local council, or your local Wildlife Trust, to ask who the landowner is.
Indeed, nature charities like your local Wildlife Trust will often be able to help you organise a cleanup, obtain the landowner’s permission to hold the event, and to get the event covered by their insurance. All you need to do is complete a couple of brief risk assessments – a site risk assessment, and a task-specific one. If possible, note whether the area is a protected area such as a nature reserve, e.g. a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest).
2. Get some equipment together
The key items are:
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Bin bags
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Bag hoops (which keep the bag open when you’re carrying it)
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Litter pickers
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Gloves
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Hand sanitiser
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A first-aid kit
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High-vis vests for keeping track of volunteers
You can use rubber gloves, but to protect your hands from cuts (and to reduce single-use glove waste!) thick gloves are recommended, such as work gloves or gardening gloves. Any plastic containers, buckets, or tubs may be useful for sorting recyclables. Remember, organisations like your local Wildlife Trust will have plenty of their own litter-picking equipment, high-vis vests, and work gloves, as well as a first-aid kit – and can help provide these items on the day.
3. Conduct a preliminary visit
Conduct a preliminary visit to your chosen beach, or section of beach. Note any possible hazards, and how likely they might be. What’s the terrain like? Are there sheer sea cliffs such as crumbly chalk cliffs, which may have rockfalls? Are there any steep slopes, mud flats, or slippery, rocky areas underfoot? Are there any known areas where there are nesting seabirds? Considering the latter, you’ll need to ask your volunteers to treat the habitat sensitively, avoiding approaching wild animals like shoreline birds or seals, and not treading on coastal vegetation. And to reduce disturbance of wildlife you might also ask your volunteers to avoid bringing dogs with them on the day.
4. Assess the litter situation
Try to gauge the quantity of litter present. Will you need to transport the collected waste to a local tip or recycling centre? If there’s a very large amount, it might be easier to arrange collection of the waste directly from the beach.
Finally, plan how you will sort the litter you gather. If you are able to, obtain some tubs or buckets to help with sorting the litter by material type, allowing it to be recycled.
5. Look at the tide times & facilities
Look up the tide times for that beach and plan the timing of the cleanup to start an hour or two after the tide has begun to go out. This will make it easiest to access any newly washed-up litter. To make things as smooth as possible for volunteers, note where the nearest parking areas are, and the nearest toilets to your chosen clean-up area.
6. Publicise the event
Lastly, publicise your event! Obviously, list the meetup point, and timings, as well as what to wear and bring (the musts are sturdy shoes or boots, water, and thick gloves).
Remember that not everyone’s online, so get the word out in local media – newspapers, magazines, circular newsletters, advertiser leaflets, and local radio. Make up some colourful flyers and stick them on local noticeboards around nearby towns, as well as any noticeboards close to the beach itself, of course - where you’ll hopefully catch the eye of locals who care about the site. Contact potential partner organisations who might want to help get the word out.
Online, social media such as local Facebook groups can be a quick, easy way to get your event noticed. Maybe you’re hoping to tailor your event to a particular group – e.g. parents and children, students, retirees, wildlife enthusiasts – and target these audiences accordingly.
Phase 2: On the day of the litter pick
As always with outdoor ‘task days’, be mindful of the weather forecast on the day. If it’s looking like adverse conditions, such as heavy rain or high winds, you might postpone the event until better weather.
Tom Marshall
At the start of the cleanup, give a brief introductory talk – introducing the task and the area, defining the edges of your cleanup area, and where the central meetup point will be. Remind everyone why collecting litter is so important, removing danger to animals and marine life. If you like, you may want to introduce the habitat and some notable species of wildlife that can be found there – and therefore why it’s so worthwhile to clear up litter there.
With regard to the risk assessment you completed, inform volunteers of any risks you found – and actions they can take to minimise them. Find out who are first-aiders and make clear where (or with whom) the first aid kit will be kept.
Remind them of the need to respect (and keep a distance from) resident wildlife. And remember that should volunteers encounter sanitary, medical, or otherwise potentially hazardous waste, it’s safer to avoid picking it up. (If you see anything hazardous or suspicious looking, contact the Environment Agency).
Let volunteers know timings, and when to gather back at your central meetup spot. Point out the locations of any nearby toilets, cafés, or other facilities. Then let your team loose to blitz the beach! Take some pictures of your event (if you have volunteers’ consent), if social media is your thing – you might inspire others to make their own cleanup event happen.
Citizen science
During your cleanup, you and your volunteer team can conduct some important citizen science while you sweep the shoreline. Recording just a few pieces of information about each item you pick up can provide useful data about the waste impacting your beach. With each item you collect, note down the kind of item – e.g. bottle, wrapper, drinks can, fishing net, degraded plastic, etc – and the type of material. Then tally how many of each item they collect.
Organisations like Keep Britain Tidy and the Marine Conservation Society have online portals or apps which help you to record data. Understanding the litter types and proportions of materials can help put pressure on producers of these materials to take more responsibility about the lifecycle of their products, and to make them more sustainable. You can read more on Keep Britain Tidy’s page.
Phase 3: After the event
At the end of your event, reconvene with everyone at the meetup point, and gather the collected waste, along with equipment, noting any data which volunteers have collected. Take your bags of rubbish to nearby dumpster bins, the allotted collection point, waste facilities, or recycling facilities. It’s best not to just leave bags of rubbish next to public litter bins, as these may get torn open again and perpetuate the litter problem.
After your event, why not write up a blog about your hard work – or let us know about how your cleanup went. What did you find, in what quantities? What wildlife did you see or hear? Who came along – what kinds of people? Did you find anything particularly unusual or unexpected? Maybe some little creatures had even made their homes in the litter? Did you learn anything which you might change if you ran another cleanup?
Finally, feel proud of the time you took to co-ordinate your cleanup and make a difference to our ever-changing and fascinating coastal habitats, and the opportunity you’ve created for the local community to realise just how worthwhile it can be to volunteer in conservation, joining forces to collectively take a little bit of pressure off our world’s precious wildlife.
Learn more about litter picking and beach cleans here.