Scottish Water Volunteers Supporting Great British Beach Clean 2022

Around 30 Scottish Water employees used their volunteering time to support this year’s Great British Beach Clean 16 – 25 September.

The Great British Beach Clean is a week-long citizen science event, organised by the Marine Conservation Society, where hundreds of beach cleans take place up and down the UK. On every, clean participants are asked to run a litter survey recording all the items of rubbish they find in a 100m stretch.

Marine Conservation Society has been supporting Nature Calls, our campaign to encourage customers to bin wipes and to call for a ban on wipes containing plastic - and we're delighted to support the Great British Beach Clean.

Over 30 Scottish Water employees took part this year at Fisherrow Sands, Musselburgh; Gosford Bay, East Lothian; Cramond Beach, Edinburgh and Craigendoran, Helensburgh which was done in collaboration with Plastic Free Helensburgh.

“Thank you to all the brilliant Scottish Water volunteers who took part in the Great British Beach Clean this year. As well as cleaning up a patch of beach, the data collected will help us in our campaigns to stop litter entering the sea in the first place.”

Catherine Gemmel
Scotland Conservation Officer, Marine Conservation Society

Scottish Water volunteers collected and recorded thousands of pieces of plastic litter including crisp/sweet wrappers and lots of plastic fragments. 

Corporate Affairs Office Catherine Henderson who did a pick at Gosford Bay with her team said: “This is the first time I've really felt the overwhelming extent of the issue – the more we walked over the sand and seaweed the more plastic I found. It just seemed to be everywhere.”

Sanitary items were also sadly still evident with wipes, plastic cotton bud sticks and other items which are incorrectly flushed found at several beaches. 

Catherine Gemmel, Scotland Conservation Officer for the Marine Conservation Society said: "Thank you to all the brilliant Scottish Water volunteers who took part in the Great British Beach Clean this year. As well as cleaning up a patch of beach, the data collected will help us in our campaigns to stop litter entering the sea in the first place.

"Each year, many single use plastic wet wipes are recorded which will have been flushed down the toilet when they should have been binned. This is why we support the Nature Calls campaign to bin all wipes and ban single use plastic wet wipes - together we can make a difference and stop the plastic tide washing up on Scotland's shores!"