Our Great British Beach Clean with Marine Conservation Society
It’s Great British Beach Clean (GBBC) week (not to be confused with GBBO, which also kicked off this week)! We teamed up with our friends at Marine Conservation Society, for our (beautifully sunny) beach clean on the Weston-Super-Mare seafront.
The GBBC is a week-long citizen science event, where hundreds of beach cleans take place across the UK, providing a great way for people to come together to clean up our beaches and help local marine life. The data which is recorded is a huge driver for Marine Conservation Society's conservation work and feeds into the International Coastal Clean-up (ICC).
16 Torchboxers met at the Grand Pier, Weston-Super-Mare and the weather was kind with glorious sunshine which put a spring in our step for some serious litter picking!
This was a great chance for us to test out the Beachwatch App we recently built and launched in time for the GBBC. It’s a progressive web application that volunteers can use to record data on and offline, about the litter items they find on the beach and details of any environmental impacts they may see along the way, such as whether there was evidence of oil and tar, or any entangled or injured animals found.
On first impressions, the beach appeared very clean, but scratch away at the surface and we were all shocked at the amount of litter we found.
After just an hour of collecting, we had recorded 1,020 items of litter, weighing 1.25kg. By the end of the day, we had collected over 5kg in total.
We all really enjoyed the day and it felt good to know we were making a difference.
There are plenty of ways you can get involved - join a local beach clean, organise your own, or find out more about the different ways you can volunteer.
You can also learn more about how we led MCS’s digital transformation - seeing a 100% increase in site visits and a 32% membership uplift.
