“The crows take it out of the bin and leave it on the beach, you know.”
Considering the six empty glass bottles of Magner’s cider already clinking in my bin bag, I thought a human social gathering on the beach a few nights before was a significantly more likely source for the litter than dipsomaniac birds.
I call them pick-up lines. The unsolicited comments from strangers when out collecting litter. Maybe they think I need some company or adult supervision. I suspect they think I’m a little soft in the head. “That’s the council’s job” is the comment I get most. I just smile. Or nod .
Excusing the local population for the blight of litter is a common theme of pick-up lines. Another man (it is always men) advised: “The Russians throw it off the ships.” I nodded. But unless they sell Tayto crisps, Club Orange and Maud’s ice cream in Moscow, this Sherlock suspects the culprits might be closer to home.
It wasn’t a conscious plan to start wombling but I’ve been doing it for nearly four years now. In 2019 I found myself living by the water of Carlingford Lough recuperating from surgery and then 2020 came along and nobody could go anywhere.
You might know the name from the Shipping Forecast. It’s a breathtaking sea lough, that leads to the Irish Sea, hewn from the rock by millennia of ice ebbing and flowing, with glaciers carving their way through the landscape. This part of the word is stunningly beautiful.
On doctor’s orders, I took long walks daily. And one day on the beach I spotted a big blue plastic sack favoured by a Scandinavian furniture outlet. I saw it a mile off down on the shore. I decided to collect it. And then it seemed silly to take it to the litter bin empty. I filled the sack and soon I was taking my own bag out with me at least once a week, maybe more. After one winter storm washed up what looked tons of plastic, I was going out daily to clear the backlog.
Many people prefer to join a group and snap their haul for Instagram as part of an organised session. I consult the tide timetable, and take 20 minutes out of my day to comb the shore alone. Depressingly, 20 minutes is all you need to fill a bin bag if you concentrate on the bigger debris. And that includes the walk there and back. Plastic bottles are the main offender.
The keener womble becomes attached to their patch. I take pride when my stretch of shore is visibly clear of rubbish from the road. But the big bits are easy. If you peer closer, you’ll find all sorts of smaller everyday items. Bottle tops. Tampon applicators. Foil and plastic tablet packets. Toys. I loathe plastic drinking straws in particular. The tiny blue ones you’ll find with a packed lunch drink are the most pernicious.
The lough doesn’t offer the unrelenting industrial churn and grind of the open sea that pulverises rubbish like glass and ceramics and mangles plastic and metal. Some of the things I collect are of a tangible age. I found a bakelite light switch one day, maybe 70 years old. It’s not uncommon to discover a drinks can with ring pull that really did once have a ring which you pulled off entirely rather than the ones familiar now. One chocolate wrapper in the sand was best before some time in 1996. A cheque guarantee card from the Midland Bank.
And as the sediment is laid down, some items are left like fossils. One day, I pulled a glass coke bottle out of the mud. Pristine and like new. I don’t know how old it was but you could once have returned it for a deposit of 10p. Someone once told me that the design brief for the famous coke bottle included the stipulation that the brand should still be recognizable even if the bottle was broken. Some of those old bottles fetch big money, I recalled. So I took it home, washed it and photographed it and put it on eBay. It sold for £25.
But that was a rare find and represents a lousy hourly rate. (although I did once also find a plastic fiver.) This isn’t trendy mudlarking popularised by Lara Maiklem in search of roman treasure (they didn't get this far anyway) or noble beachcombing in hope of profit from flotsam and jetsam. It’s just clearing up after other people.
Reports say that there might be as many as 5 trillion individual items of plastic in the oceans. Filling a bag with a few dozen bits and bobs here and there isn’t going to resolve that problem. Many will argue that it’s up to the big brands to stop using single use plastic but when a fast food chain tried to introduce paper straws they were faced with a barrage of abuse because they’d go soggy.
Government regulation, and perhaps a levy, would reduce usage overall and seems both inevitable and welcome. But when I consider my shoreline, and this little bit of the sea, the best solution would be an end to local littering and greater use of the bins provided.
As the lockdown rules were loosened at the start of summer 2020 the volume of litter gradually returned to normal levels with familiar waste joined by surgical gloves and disposable face masks. Both quite easily spotted amongst the rocks in their distinctive shade of light blue.
Not long after the drive-thrus opened again, I found a chip carton in that familiar red livery emblazoned with a golden M. I picked it up and put it in my bag. It must have come a fair distance. Where is the nearest branch? It must be at least 8 miles away. As the crow flies.