The day before yesterday, on Saturday, I went to Birling Gap near Eastbourne to take part in the Great British Beach Clean event, organised by the Marine Conservation Society, that was held there. Birling Gap, the hamlet that is in the process of vanishing due to coastal erosion, is situated between the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head ans thus attracts a high number of visitors. This in turn means that, although it may appear beautiful at first sight, there is usually also a lot of rubbish to be found on the beach.
The area our group, consisting of approximately 15 people or so, cleaned was not exactly huge (we went along the red line in the picture below) as it was more important to clean a relative small beach section properly than to go over a bigger area and do only a half-hearted job. We were, however, advised to stay away from the edge of the cliff - although quite a lot of rubbish was lying around there - due to safety concerns.
After about an hour of picking up rubbish this is what we got:
And we still did not manage to collect everything lying around, not just because some of the rubbish was too close to the cliff edge but also because it was very easy to overlook especially the smaller pieces (e.g. sweet wrappers) between the stones and pebbles. So, even if a number of other people had already covered a certain area, you could still find something that had escaped their eyes.
For the Beach Clean event today on Monday, at Rock-a-Nore in Hastings, we were a much smaller group (six people) and the pile of rubbish found on the beach was smaller as well - but still about 6 kg in toto. The things we picked up there were for the most pasrt small bits: plastic bottle caps, lollopop sticks, sweet wrappers, pieces of nets and strings.
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