Babymel World Oceans Day Beach Clean
On Tuesday it was World Oceans Day. A day to help spread awareness about the importance of protecting our oceans. The ocean covers over 70% of the planet and provides 80% of the world’s biodiversity, as well as feeding billions of people and producing at least 50% of the planet’s oxygen. It’s safe to say that these numbers alone mean that the ocean is crucial to our survival on this planet. But we need to help conserve our wonderful marine resources for the future generations.
There are so many easy things that we can do to protect our oceans from recycling in our homes, picking up our litter when we go out and reducing our plastic consumption but we wanted to do something more. To create awareness of World Oceans Day, the Babymel office team headed down to our local beach in Brighton for the day to run a beach clean up.
Brighton & Hove Council provided everything we needed for a clean up including; gloves, litter pickers and bin bags, it couldn’t have been easier to arrange! We spent the day on the beach searching for discarded or washed up rubbish, mainly consisting of bottle tops, plastic food wrappers and smashed glass. All of these things though small in size, have a huge impact on the environment. It was reported in 2019 over 30,000 plastic bottle tops were found on Brighton Beach alone from March - December, if stacked up this would total a height of 1,470ft, taller than the Shard in London - the tallest building in Europe. Plastic bottle caps are also in the top 5 discarded items that are most deadly for sea life as they are easy to choke on or swallow. So although picking up a small amount of bottle caps seems like a minor challenge, each one is a step towards a cleaner and safer environment for our wildlife and oceans.
Brighton council told us they need all the help they can get from volunteers, they are hugely underfunded and understaffed so cannot keep up with the cleaning of this vast area of beach, particularly in the summer months. There is of course an easy solution to a huge part of this problem, and that is to simply pick up everything that you take with you to the beach. The majority of the waste on UK beaches isn’t washed up, it is left over by the public after their trip to the beach. It’s not just in Brighton that this is a problem but beaches all over the UK need your help to reduce this problem as much as possible.
On Brighton Beach, they encourage people to take a couple of minutes out of their day to pick up their rubbish or any waste they spot on the beach. They have this great station outside the lifeguards hut in the central area, with litter pickers and bin bags ready for you to do your bit to help. Not only is it important that we do our bit to help the environment but it's also a great day out with a team or family and it can be fun too. Why not take your kids for a day out over the summer and help to be part of the change to our oceans. Give your local council a call and they will sort the rest, it’s that simple!
