Everyone is welcome to the North Devon Beach Clean Series and the SAS team looks forward to seeing SAS members, supporters, environmentalists, families, local surfing and watersports clubs joining them – the whole local beach-loving community in fact!

North Devon Beach Clean Series

· Woolacombe – 12th November 11am – 1pm
· Saunton Sands – 13th November 11am – 1pm
· Westward Ho! – 26th November 11am – 1pm
· Woody Bay – 27th November – 10am – Midday
· Lynmouth – 27th November – 2pm – 4pm
As many SAS supporters and local residents will already be aware, the amount of marine litter found on UK beaches has almost doubled in the last fifteen years, with at least 1 piece being found on average for every 30cm of sand. Since 1994, plastic items washing up on our shores have increased by 135%. Plastic debris can take hundreds of years to break down and can be lethal to marine wildlife. The power is in our hands to make a difference and we hope to see hundreds of volunteers making a positive difference to the North Devon coast this November.

“Its amazing to see a real concentrated beach clean campaign right here in North Devon. We have some of the country’s best surf spots situated on one of the most beautiful stretches of coastlines in the world, and this will be a great opportunity to pull together and make a positive impact on the ever growing marine litter problem.” Mikey Corker, SAS North Devon Rep

SAS will be joined by local SAS Rep Mikey Corker who will be helping lead the SAS assault on unwanted beach litter. SAS will also be joined by friends from the Museum of British Surfing, which is based at the heart of the North Devon surfing community in Braunton.

Volunteers who would like take part in one or more of the events should contact Dom Ferris, SAS Campaign Officer on dom@sas.org.uk or call 01872 555 953

This summer saw over a thousand volunteers take part in Surfers Against Sewage’s (SAS) annual Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project, leaving beaches all around the UK cleaner and safer. The response to SAS’s Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project was truly staggering as SAS members, surfing communities and the wider public came together for beach cleans across the country to tackle the growing tide of trash. The litter collected, over 2.5 tonnes, is the equivalent of 5000 empty plastic bottles – which would create a pile nearly 12 times the height of Blackpool Tower.

The amount of marine litter found on UK beaches has doubled in the last 15 years. In a recent survey, 63.5% of litter found on UK beaches was made of plastic, which can take hundreds of years to break down and can be lethal to marine wildlife. With 80% of this debris arriving from land-based sources, including the general public, the power is in our hands to make a positive difference to stop the growing problem of marine litter. Beach cleans are a great way to remove marine litter, inspire community action and ensure the beach is a clean and safe place for all to enjoy.

SAS’s Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project visited 14 locations around the country between May and September, including Portrush in Northern Ireland, The River Thames in London, Porthtowan in Cornwall, Bellhaven in Scotland, Whitley Bay in North Tyneside, Scarborough in Yorkshire and Newgale Beach in Wales.

SAS Beach Rescue Widemouth 2011

There were fantastic prizes handed out for guessing the weight of the litter collected and the most unusual piece of litter found, awarded in honour of SAS’s ‘weird fish’, a quirky sculpture created from pieces of beach debris. The summer saw many bizarre items removed but the most unusual finds included a toilet seat, a bright blue fire extinguisher and a Korean ship’s captain’s business card. After each of the summer’s fourteen beach clean events, award-winning Californian wine brand Barefoot Wine celebrated everyone’s efforts with a beachfront BBQ, complimentary glasses of Barefoot Wine and a free organic cotton Barefoot Wine t-shirt for every person, and at a select number of events, the party really took off with a rousing performance from Devon singer-songwriter Ben Howard.

Surfers Against Sewage Director Hugo Tagholm said “Surfers Against Sewage is delighted to have mobilised a record number of beach clean volunteers through the Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Tour 2011. Community beach cleans are a great way of bringing together our supporters and wider public to tackle marine litter, helping protect beautiful beaches right around the UK. This year’s events removed over 2.5 tonnes of marine litter from the coast, making it a safer and nicer place for everyone to enjoy. We’re thrilled to have such a positive partnership with Barefoot Wine, who have supported our marine litter campaigns for a number of years through beach clean activities. We’d like to thank Barefoot Wine and everyone who took part in the tour, and look forward to seeing you all again next year!”

Barefoot Wine representative Alistair Feest said “We knew that 2011 would be a big year for the beach cleans, but it’s really exceeded expectations so we’d like to thank everyone who came to see Barefoot Wine and SAS and make all the events so special. Our Barefooters have always worked with local communities and that spirit was so evident at every single one of our events this summer because come rain or shine, we’ve had people from all over the UK joining us to make more of the UK’s beaches ‘barefoot friendly’.”

The concept was launched in the UK with SAS four years ago and has brought local communities together to help remove unwanted litter from beaches and reinstate Britain’s coastline to its former natural glory.

The amount of marine litter found on UK beaches has almost doubled in the last fifteen years*, with at least 1 piece being found on average every 30cm. Alarmingly, 70% of the litter entering our oceans sinks to the seabed, with 15% floating on the surface and the remaining 15% being washed onto our beaches. Since 1994, plastic items washing items washing up on our shores have increased by 135%. Plastic debris can take hundreds of years to break down and can be lethal to marine wildlife. Over 95% of birds recently examined in the North Sea had ingested plastic items and over 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die each year from ingestion and entanglement.

With 80% of this debris arriving from land-based sources, including the general public, the power is in our hands to make a positive difference to stop this tide of trash. Beach cleans are a great way to remove marine litter, inspire community action and reinforce key SAS anti-litter campaign messages such as Return To Offender and No Butts on the Beach.

SAS Barefoot Beach Rescue

SAS and Barefoot Wine are calling on community volunteers to help clean beaches at locations around the country as part of the growing wave of grassroots activism protecting some of the UK’s finest beaches. To date, the Barefoot Friendly Beach Rescue Tour has welcomed thousands of volunteers who together removed many tonnes of marine litter from the coastline. This year, with the growing public awareness of marine litter issues, we hope to attract a greater number of volunteers than ever before to help remove this unsightly and hazardous litter from our nation’s beautiful beaches.

For full dates visit SAS.

*MCS Beach Watch Survey

The take home is this technology is real and it works! We saw first-hand how you can take normal everyday plastic, from #2 to #7 including thin films wrappers. Put it in this cute little gizmo and voila! Out comes oil!

The oil can then be run through the same machine and further processed into gasoline, kerosene, and diesel. Then, put it in your tank and go surfing! Oh, don’t forget to pick up some trash while you are at the beach to refuel!

This is definitely not the only answer to the huge global issue of marine debris, though I bet we could incentivise beach clean-ups if plastic was worth money! We hope to bring a machine to Santa Barbara to demonstrate this technology by doing beach clean-ups and driving away on the plastic we processed. We also want to set up demonstration sites in areas around the world with substandard waste infrastructure to show how we can turn our trash into treasure.

We dream of people making a living from cleaning the beaches, and with your support we can make this happen! Please donate to our common cause.

Since 1994, the volume of marine litter on UK beaches has increased by 146%* and SAS is helping combat this tide line of trash through its beach cleans and ongoing campaigns. Motivocean is SAS’s most ambitious beach clean tour to date and will be calling in at over 20 major UK beaches and waterside locations across the nation, including:

19th August: Portmeor (St Ives, Cornwall)

21st August: Sennen (Cornwall), Tynmouth (Northumberland) & Cromer (Norfolk)

22nd August: Praa Sands (Cornwall) & Croyde Bay (North Devon)

23rd August: Porthtowan (Cornwall)

24th August: Fistral (Cornwall)

25th August: Bude (Cornwall), Newgale (Mid-Wales) & Gwithian (Cornwall)

26th August: Bigbury On Sea (South Devon) & Ainsdale (Merseyside)

27th August: Boscombe Surf Reef (Dorset), Belhaven (Edinburgh, Scotland) & Scarborough (Yorkshire)

28th August: Compton, Isle of Wight (Hampshire), Machrihanish (west Scotland), Saltburn (Yorkshire) & Brighton (east of the pier, near Yellow Wave)

29th August: East Witterings (West Sussex) & The Thames (London)

30th August: Broadstairs (Kent)

Everyone is welcome at the events and thanks to the support of the youth volunteering charity v, SAS can also offer volunteers between 16 – 25 years old the opportunity to access and experience exciting sports, including surfing, by participating in these beach cleans. The sea and coastal environment are a vital component of so many sporting activities from sailing to surfing, and SAS hopes to further build awareness about coastal conservation by linking beach sports to the protection of the environment.

Hugo Tagholm, Director of Surfers Against Sewage, commented, “We’re delighted to be holding our ‘Motivocean 20th Anniversary Beach Clean Tour’ at so many locations this year. The tour will help us engage a record number of new environmental activists and volunteers to make a meaningful difference to the UK’s precious beaches and the wider marine environment. We look forward to welcoming everyone to local events; our members, supporters, families and youth volunteers.”

To sign up please email Chris@sas.org.uk with the location you’d like to join SAS at, your name, age and contact details. If you are between 16 – 25 years old, you can also sign up directly at www.vinspired.com.

So, please go along to an event near you, meet SAS team members and like-minded volunteers, and help protect a beach near you!

Keep Britain Tidy has revealed it’s winners and losers in the 2010 study. The awards recognise a whole range of criteria from lack of litter, good beach management and also lack of sewage. The number has dropped by one from last year but is still up from 24 to 77 in a decade.

Download the pdf here.

Over 650 enthusiastic volunteers from the local community rallied together to clean 29 beaches between Lynton and the Cornish border, despite rainy weather on the Friday and part of Saturday. Sunday however proved to be a typically lovely North Devon spring day with many volunteers playing on the beach and enjoying a picnic after the beach clean.

A total of 653 bags of rubbish were collected, with a further 57 bags of re-cycling waste. Amongst the rubbish, some interesting finds included: A bottle from Ilfracombe Dairy with telephone number ’226′, Plastic ride-on police car, Bicycle saddle, gas cylinder; lorry tyres, oil cans, fishing rod, toothbrushes, toy soldiers, fire extinguishers, plastic cutlery, an unexploded firework, shotgun cartridges, a fridge, a pram, a dune buggy, lots of lolly pop sticks and cotton bud sticks and ear plugs.

Most importantly, everyone who took part had a great time and were extremely positive in their feedback of the day.

The Beach Clean was also part of the North Devon Coast AONB’s 50th Anniversary programme, a fitting event to celebrate our stunning North Devon AONB coastline.

Andy Bell, North Devon’s Biosphere Reserve Co-ordinator said, “The enthusiastic support shown for the Biosphere Beach Clean Weekend has been fantastic. Schoolchildren and businesses braved the rain on Friday, whilst the weekend volunteers enjoyed better weather.

Everyone pitched in with great enthusiasm, good humour and community spirit. We are really delighted and appreciative that such a huge number of the local community, from such a wide range care for this world-class environment and gave up their precious free time at the weekend.

Schoolchildren, students, families, individuals, organisations, businesses, our local MPs and Councillors,visitors and a local troupe of Morris Dancers showed impressive energy and commitment.”

Our website has photos and a short film, which capture the essence of the day: www.northdevonbiospherereserve.org.uk . We think they show a proud North Devon community doing their bit and enjoying our wonderful environment.

Biospheres are about the contribution the environment plays in our lives and how we as a community, proud of our world class UNESCO status, can play our part in sustaining our environment for future generations. Everyone who took part demonstrated the value we give to our special places and saw first-hand the harm we can do to our environment. I’m sure like me, they will be thinking very carefully about the volume of rubbish we all produce, how we can reduce it and how we might better dispose of it.

Given the overwhelming success of this year’s beach clean weekend and all the support from such a wide range of organisations and businesses we hope next year to build on this for future events.

We are all very proud of North Devon and want it to remain one of the world’s great places. Thank you to everyone who gave up their time or demonstrated their support.

For more information please visit the North Devon Biosphere web site.

SAS waved goodbye to winter in spectacular style with their most successful spring clean to date, with 8 beach cleans taking place in Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, Brighton, North Yorkshire and Edinburgh. Lead by SAS campaigns staff, SAS reps and volunteer organisers almost 350 volunteers stuffed over 600 refuse bags. Relieving the ocean environment of the burden of over 2 tonnes of man made, marine litter (in just two hours!).

What was sadly unsurprising is that the majority of the litter found was plastics and that 2 tonnes, although amazing, is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. The problems associated with plastics in the marine environment are reaching apocalyptic levels. A plastic bottle will take at least 450 years to break down and whilst this occurs will serve as a magnet for highly toxic chemicals. Marine animals have been shown to mistake plastics for food and at least 100,000 marine mammals and 1,000,000 sea birds die of plastic entanglement or suffocation each year. With there being 1 piece of marine litter for every 48 square centimetres of beach in the UK and that fact that not a single beach on the entire planet is free of man made debris, the problem has surely reached a point that can no longer be ignored.

The facts on marine litter are undeniable and distressing. However, on this, the first day of spring in a new decade, it was possible to feel some hope that we can turn it around. This hope came from the great atmosphere felt at all of the beach cleans and the passion and determination shown by so many people from such a great variety of backgrounds. By Sunday afternoon it was clear that the action of SAS and its wonderful volunteers had made a real and visible difference to the condition of 8 of our beautiful beaches.

SAS Campaigns Officer, Dom Ferris says; “The weekend leaves me with mixed emotions. On one hand it is so inspiring to see all the volunteers donating their time and passion towards caring for their beach, but on the other it is distressing to see the sheer volume of man made litter that’s impacting upon our oceans. The fact that this problem is getting worse adds to that feeling. However with grass roots action like beach cleans in conjunction with SAS campaigns such as our petition to Gordon Brown calling for the implementation of a National Marine litter Strategy, we can and will make a difference!”